
ES WIT 
RROUGHS 



H 



H.DE LOACH 




Book J? ^ 

Gopght N° 



COPYRIGHT 11EPOS1T. 




JOHN BURROUGHS 



RAMBLES WITH 
JOHN BURROUGHS 



R. J. H. De LOACH 



Illustrated with photographs by the Author 




RICHARD G. BADGER 

THE GORHAM PRESS 
BOSTON 



Copyright 1912 by Richard G. Badger 
All Rights Reserved 



T6ux4 

•Ha- 



The Qorham Press, Boston, Mats* 

V 

€CU314453 



To 

THE DEAR OLD 

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA 

and her 

Noble faculty who have ever inspired me 

I dedicate this little volume 



PREFACE 

THERE is a longing in every student's 
life some time or other to share his 
pleasure with the world, and if he 
happens to find himself in the proper 
environment he cannot forego that pleasure. His 
studies, his anxieties, his loves and his devotions 
are a part of him and he cannot give himself to 
the world without giving these. 

My personal contact with John Burroughs has 
meant a great deal to me and these papers repre- 
sent in a measure what I have enjoyed, though 
they come far short of what I would like them to 
be. Some of them were written among his 
native hills and it is hoped they will give the 
flavor of his own experiences. Others were 
written at odd times on trains, on boats, and in 
my study here, where I have enjoyed re-reading 
so many times his essays on Nature. The 
qualities of the man and his papers have always 
made a direct appeal to me, and I love to come 
in contact with him and spend days with him. 

Long before they were printed in book form, 
I had collected most of his poems in my old scrap 
book and studied them. Their simplicity and 
beauty combined with their perfect rhythm 
impressed me and almost at one reading I was 
able to remember them line for line. 
5 



6 PREFACE 

The names of Burroughs and Whitman are 
forever linked together and one can hardly think 
of one in certain relations without thinking of 
the other. To the literary public they have 
many ideals in common, and their bonds of sym- 
pathy have been knit together forever in Bur- 
roughs essays. To be associated with Burroughs 
is therefore to get many interesting and valu- 
able hints on the life and works of Whitman. 
While I write this preface Mr. Burroughs talks 
with me in the evenings on the possible future 
influence of Whitman on American literary meth- 
ods and criticism. The reader will not be sur- 
prised therefore, to find in this collection of papers, 
one on the relation of these two grand old men. 

I have not attempted to interpret John Bur- 
roughs. He is his own interpreter and the very 
best one. In writing the papers, I have had in 
mind only just what he has meant to me. How 
he has affected me and changed the course of my 
life. How he has given me new eyes with which 
to see, new ears with which to hear, and a new 
heart with which to love God's great out-o '-doors. 

Athens, Ga. January, 1911. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Simple Life 11 

Around Slabsides and the Den 36 

John Burroughs in the South 48 

Around Roxbury 64 

The Old Clump 82 

John Burroughs as Poet 93 

John Burroughs and Walt Whitman 108 

John Burroughs and the Birds 124 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

John Burroughs Frontispiece 

In the Old Barn 16 

The Old Stone Wall built by Deacon Scudder 24 

The Study 32 

Slabsides 40 

Burroughs Listening to the Cardinal in Georgia 48 
At the Bars in front of The Old Burial Ground 56 
Over the Site of his Grandfather's Old Home 64 
Under a Catskill Ledge where he has often 

been protected from the rain in summer 72 

A Catskill Mountain Side 80 

Under the Old Grey Ledge 88 

On the Summit of the Old Clump 96 

Looking across the Pasture Wall 104 

Stones marking Site of Thoreau's Cabin. . . 112 

Pointing out the Junco's Nest 128 

My Chickadee's Nest 140 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 

THE great majority of people consider 
that this expression about defines a 
summer outing, or a camping trip and 
that is the end of it. They cannot 
associate it with any form of living for they have 
not tried the simple life. A few weeks in summer 
they are in the habit of unfolding their tents and 
going away to the mountains where they can for 
a short while rid themselves of conventionalities 
and try out nature. On such occasions they are 
forced to do most of their own work, and hence 
are primarily interested in reducing this to the 
minimum. Usually those who seek this form of 
the simple life are glad when the spell is over and 
they are back safely in the home. 

Once in awhile and perhaps at long intervals, 
the world gives birth to a character tuned in a 
lower key than the average of us, that by virtue 
of its inborn love of simplicity and lack of things 
to worry over, prefers to remove the deadly weights 
of the conventional and to live in harmony with 
the forces of the world. In this way native 
merits are allowed to expand and grow. Such 
persons are meek and lowly with much humility 
of spirit and usually gifted with a great capacity 
11 



n RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

for love. Unconsciously they are continually 
weeding out everything from their lives that 
tends in any way to abate their natural forces, 
and by the time they are far on the way of life 
they have become entirely free from those things 
that hold most of us aloof from the best the 
world has to offer. 

The human race has given very few such 
characters to the world, in fact not a great enough 
number to formulate in any sense a law of the 
probability and chance of their production. Dio- 
genes is an illustration of such a character, who 
after an early life of luxury, settled upon an ex- 
tremely simple life during his later years, and 
grew in wisdom and understanding in proportion 
to his devotion to such life. Gilbert White after 
a thorough college training refused many offers 
to appointments to honorable posts in order to 
live simply at the Wakes and make a complete 
record of the Natural History about Selburne. 
In preference to large paying positions in many 
parts of the Kingdom, he chose clerical work at 
very low pay that he may remain at home and 
not miss any important event in the Natural 
History thereabouts. Thoreau is another type 
of the advocate of the simple life. He could have 
remained about Concord all his days as other men 
and have amounted to as little as many of them 
did, if he had preferred. But instead, he deliber- 
ately planned an experiment in plain living and 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 13 

high thinking. It has been thought by many 
that he was an extremist, but how many of us 
there are who would gladly take his claim to 
immortality. His experiment was a success. 
So soon as he cast off all obstacles to free thinking, 
his mind seized on the things he most loved and 
desired, and made him famous. 

Another character that belongs in this category, 
and the one in whom we are the most concerned 
in the present paper, is John Burroughs. Born 
in one of the most beautiful sections of a great 
country, and reared on a farm where he learned 
first hand the secrets of nature, he has never 
departed far from the simple life. At the age of 
seventy-five he still finds greatest comfort away 
from any human habitation, and the earth be- 
neath — the sky above, and nothing to mar his 
inner musings. Strange to say the happiest 
environment that ever comes to him is amid the 
very hills where he first saw the light. Recently, 
he confessed as he lifted his eyes to a Catskill 
sunrise: "How much these dear old hills mean 
to me! When in my playful youth little did I 
think as I went along this road-way to school 
every morning that some day I should fall back 
upon these scenes for thought, love, inspiration! 
O what a wholesome effect they have upon me!" 
This I am sure is not an exaggerated statement 
of the case. He really longs to get back among 
the hills of his nativity on the return of summer, 



14 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

and so long as health and strength permits he will 
'return to the place of his birth, though he cannot 
go back to his youth/ There in the quiet of the 
country, nestled among those beautiful hills and 
valleys, he can get into the free and wholesome 
open air and live as he likes, while the many 
pleasant memories of his earlier days seem to act 
as a lubricant to his already active mind. 

A simple life is not necessarily a life of idleness, 
but may on the other hand be the very busiest of 
lives. In fact, is the product of any mind as 
wholesome, as pure, as great as it might be when 
the denominator is not reduced to its lowest 
terms? Let us not get the little summer visit to 
the mountains confused with the larger simple 
life. Very few campers on a summer vacation 
ever know the real joy of a quiet life as Thoreau 
lived it at Walden Pond, or as Burroughs lives it 
at Slabsides in spring and at Woodchuck Lodge 
in summer. Such a life as I am writing about is a 
psychological condition as well as a physical en- 
vironment, and results from a choice or prefer- 
ence of two or more methods of living. It carries 
with it no regrets, no envy, no covetousness. 
Perhaps such a life would prove impossible when 
forced upon one, but happy indeed is he who, 
having lived as other men, learns "to reduce the 
necessities of subsistence to their lowest terms" 
and proves, " that in every life there is time to be 
wise, and opportunity to tend the growth of the 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 15 

spirit." 'Tis then and only then that he can 
"share the great, sunny, joyous life of the earth, 
or be as happy as the birds are! as contented as 
the cattle on the hills! as the leaves of the trees 
that dance and rustle in the wind ! as the waters 
that murmur and sparkle to the sea!" 

All of this I think John Burroughs has realized 
if ever any man has realized it. Sitting in an 
old barn about a hundred yards from Woodchuck 
Lodge, his summer home, in his home-made chair, 
and for his writing desk an old chicken coop with 
one board-covered side, and a large piece of heavy 
manila paper covering this, is the way I found 
him at work. In front of the opening or barn 
door was The Old Clump, the mountain of his 
boyhood days to inspire, to uplift him. Even the 
summer home in which he lives savors too much 
of the conventional. To be absolutely free is a 
consummation devoutly to be sought for — and this 
he finds, experiences, cherishes. Writing at 
seventy-five? Yes, thinking and writing, — but 
writing, thinking and living best when living 
simplest. With his dark brown wash-suit and 
cap on, he is not afraid to sit or roll on mother 
earth nor to climb a tree if necessary. Before 
breakfast we go to gather some apples for the 
table, and nothing would do but I should hold the 
basket while he mounted the tree and picked the 
apples. Then over the brow of the hill after 
breakfast to get potatoes for dinner — but to stop 



16 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

long enough at the old barn for a snap-shot of 
him and to learn of the j unco's nest built in the 
hay only six feet from his chicken-coop desk. The 
bird as busy in her work rearing her young as 
Burroughs writing his essays, and the two blend 
beautifully in the picturesque barn. This is the 
only record, he tells me, of a junco nesting under 
human habitation, so I get two very good pictures 
of the bird entering the nest. 

Only a few weeks before, he had remodeled 
Woodchuck Lodge and put a rustic porch on it. 
His niece, referring to Mr. Burroughs during the 
time, says: "I never saw a happier person than 
Uncle John was then. He would work all day 
and rest well at night, and was in a happy mood 
all the time. If there ever was such a thing as a 
happy person on earth, I think he was then." 
And nothing delights him more now than to point 
out the different pieces of furniture he made with 
his own hands. Every piece of it is up to the 
standard of the Craftsman, and the buffet and 
dining table quite tasty, while the rustic reading 
table and cot showed considerable ingenuity in 
the adaptation of odd-shaped pieces of bark cover- 
ed wood to man's needs. All in all, it was an ex- 
cellent piece of work, and far more picturesque 
than any factory work I ever saw. 

This man of whom we write is in many respects 
a wonderful man. His first dash into literature 
was purely and simply Transcendentalism, a 



\ 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 17 

" kind of a mixture of Emersonian philosophy and 
metaphysics, and is by no means poor literature, 
but perhaps far too complicated or vague for the 
mental fibre of its author. So he starts from the 
first again and writes about the common things 
of the farm and forest. " It was mainly to break 
the spell of Emerson's influence," he says, "and 
get upon ground of my own that I took to writing 
upon outdoor themes." The selection has been 
a happy one and has probably done much to recast, 
as it were, the author of Expression — to reduce 
his denominator, if not increase the numerator. 
Thinking and writing on every-day themes has 
induced him to almost get out and live with the 
animals and plants. It has very largely been 
responsible for the growth of his sane, whole- 
some mind housed - in such a healthy body. 
Under no other conditions it seems to me could 
he have given to the world "so much of sane 
thinking, cool judgment, dispassionate reasoning, 
so many evidences of a calm outlook upon life 
and the world." In fact, could he have experi- 
enced these things in conventional life? His 
philosophy is well ripened and at the same time 
wonderfully human and appreciative. Each new 
book from his pen shows in every way the intense 
enthusiasm of the author for the great study that 
he has made his life work. 

We may ask, how does he spend his time in 
this country home when not actually engaged in 



18 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

writing? Going about from farm to farm talking 
to the common people about the seasons, the 
crops, and perhaps now and then advising with 
them on some phase of farm work, such as curing 
hay or mowing grain. Sometimes he goes to the 
mountains and under some ledge of rocks he will 
be found studying the nature of the geological 
formation of the earth. A small angled stone in 
his hand, he picks into the side of the stone wall 
and makes some interesting discovery. While 
thus engaged, he hears in the hemlock forest be- 
hind him lively bird notes, and suddenly turning 
gets a glimpse of the author when for the first 
time in that particular woods he sees the warbling 
or white-eyed vireo. On his return he follows 
up a stone fence for several hundred feet to get a 
little study of the chipmunk, or to locate a new 
flower that he happens not to have seen this 
season. He knows where it ought to be, but has 
not located it yet. With the growth, color, and 
size of a particular species he associates its environ- 
ment and perhaps learns something new about 
this too before he reaches home again. Wher- 
ever his fancy leads him, whether it be to the trout 
stream or the mountain side, he shows a wonder- 
ful vigor, keen vision, and alert attention to the 
life about him that is apparent in all his writings. 
I find no other writer on Natural History themes 
quite up to Burroughs in honesty and keenness 
of observation, delicacy of sentiment, and elo- 
quent simplicity of style. 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 19 

For the past few years, Burroughs' mind has 
turned to philosophy rather than Nature study — 
the causes of things rather than things. This is to 
be expected of one who has given the mind 
opportunity for consecutive development for the 
past half century. He has always been a philoso- 
pher, but only his two last volumes of essays — 
Ways of Nature, and Leaf and Tendril show the 
deeper currents in his life. It is in these that we 
see him much concerned about the constitution 
of nature and the history of creation. His mind 
has ripened to this, and it is surprising to know 
how versatile he is on the structure of organic 
beings, and the geological formation of the earth's 
crust, and the evolution of life. Perhaps no nature 
writer, ancient or modern, is so largely responsible 
for the universal interest in the nature study move- 
ment at the present time, as John Burroughs. 
How many he leads to an appreciation of nature! 
and how many personal friends he has among all 
classes of people! Then too his writings have 
recently found their way to the schools — thanks 
to Miss Burt. With all his love for the freedom 
of the woods and mountains, he is a sociable being, 
and is thereby subject to many interruptions 
from friends. But despite this he has accom- 
plished far more in the way of substantial writing 
than the average author, and recently said that 
if he keeps up his present rate he will soon have 
his shelves filled with his own writings. One 



20 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

thing is quite conspicuous about his relation to 
other people — His friends are the warmest of 
friends, and whenever I have been with him, he 
has had a good deal to say about them. In his 
Indoor Studies, he confesses that he is too con- 
scious of persons. "I feel them too much, defer 
to them too much, and try too hard to adapt my- 
self to them. " But there is a certain influence he 
has felt from friends that has, in all probability, 
given him a calmer and more beautiful outlook 
upon the world. Often he is invited to dine with 
the rich, but always reluctantly accepts, and I 
think the best part of it to him is his return to 
the simple life. He says: "I am bound to praise 
the simple life, because I have lived it and found 
it good. When I depart from it, evil results 
follow. I love a small house, plain clothes, simple 
living. How free one feels, how good the elements 
taste, how close one gets to them, how they fit 
one's body and one's soul!" 



II 



Not many years after I had known Mr. 
Burroughs personally, it occurred to me to look 
up his literary record and see just how his years 
have been spent and associate with this the fruit of 
his labors. The long jump from Notes on Walt 
Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), his first 
book to Leaf and Tendril (1908), his last volume, 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 21 

marks a wonderful change in interest and study. 
But the record is made, the books stand for 
themselves, and we would not have it otherwise. 
This is the way of nature and of her best inter- 
preter, John Burroughs, whose nature books 
almost have the fresh and sweet flavor of wild 
strawberries, and tell in unmistakable language 
the author's love for and knowledge of the out- 
door world in which he has spent so much of his 
life. Reared in the country, he knows country 
life and country people and loves them. In his 
early years, his mind must have been very sus- 
ceptible to impressions of truthful observations, 
which formed a setting for his after work. Of 
this I think he is still conscious, judging from the 
advice he gives teachers in a copy of the Pennsyl- 
vania School Journal I happen to have before 
me. " I confess, I am a little skeptical about the 
good of any direct attempt to teach children to 
'see nature.' The question with me would be 
rather how to treat them or lead them so that 
they would not lose the love of nature which as 
children, they already have. Every girl and 
every boy up to a certain age loves nature and has 
a quick eye for the curious and interesting things 
in the fields and woods. But as they grow older 
and the worldly habit of mind grows upon them, 
they lose this love; this interest in nature becomes 
only so much inert matter to them. The boy 
may keep up his love of fishing and of sport, and 



22 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

thus keep in touch with certain phases of nature, 
but the girl gradually loses all interest in out-door 
things. 

"If I were a teacher I would make excursions 
into the country with my children; we would 
picnic together under the trees, and I would con- 
trive to give them a little live botany. They 
should see how much a flower meant to me. 
What we find out ourselves tastes so good! I 
would as far as possible let the child be his own 
teacher. The spirit of inquiry — awaken that in 
him if you can — if you cannot, the case is about 
hopeless. 

"I think that love of nature which becomes a 
precious boon and solace in life, does not as a rule 
show itself in the youth. The youth is a poet in 
feeling, and generally he does not care for poetry. 
He is like a bulb — rich in those substances that 
are to make the future flower and fruit of the 
plant. 

"As he becomes less a poet in his unconscious 
life, he will take more and more to poetry as 
embodied in literary forms. In the same way, 
as he recedes from nature, as from his condition 
of youthful savagery, he is likely to find more and 
more interest in the wild life about him. Do not 
force a knowledge of natural things upon him too 
young. " 

If Mr. Burroughs had been taught nature after 
the academic fashion, he would never have 



THE SIMPLE LIFE S3 

developed the love for the subject that is so 
evident in all his out-door books. My impres- 
sion is that his early environment was best suited 
to him and he was the child so "like a bulb." 
He absorbed nature without having any con- 
sciousness of what it meant. "I was born of and 
among people," he says, "who neither read books 
nor cared for them, and my closest associations 
since have been with those whose minds have been 
alien to literature and art. My unliterary en- 
vironment has doubtless been best suited to me. 
Probably what little freshness and primal sweet- 
ness my books contain is owing to this circum- 
stance. Constant intercourse with bookish men 
and literary circles I think would have dwarfed 
or killed my literary faculty. This perpetual 
rubbing heads together, as in literary clubs, 
seems to result in literary sterility. In my own 
case at least what I most needed was what I had 
— a few books and plenty of things." The 
roaming over the hills and mountains and follow- 
ing up trout streams was most conducive to his 
life, and thus it was he spent his odd hours and 
rest-days. This gave him "plenty of real things," 
and just what they have meant to him you will be 
able to learn from his twelve out-door volumes. 
But what brought all this long string of books 
out of him? How comes it that he turned to 
literature as a profession? From the earliest he 
had a passion for authorship, and when in the 



U RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

"teens" resolved to become a writer. "It was 
while I was at school, in my nineteenth year," 
he says, "that I saw my first author; and I dis- 
tinctly remember with what emotion I gazed upon 
him, and followed him in the twilight, keeping 
on the other side of the street. 
I looked upon him with more reverence and en- 
thusiasm than I had ever looked upon any man. 
I suppose this was the 
instinctive tribute of a timid and imaginative 
youth to a power which he was beginning vaguely 
to see — the power of letters. " 

By this time Mr. Burroughs had begun to see 
his own thoughts in print in a country newspaper. 
He also began writing essays about the same 
time and sending them to various periodicals 
only to receive "them back pretty promptly." 
These perhaps rather conventional papers on 
such subjects as Genius, Individuality, A Man 
and His Times, etc., served a great purpose. 
They tutored the author of them into his better 
papers that were welcomed by the editor of the 
Atlantic Monthly and other leading periodicals. 
In his twenty-first year, he discovered Emerson — 
so to speak — in a Chicago book-store, and says: 
"All that summer I fed upon these essays and 
steeped myself in them." No doubt Emerson's 
essays had a wonderful influence on this young 
reader and almost swamped him. They warped 
him out of his orbit so far, that had he not resolved 



**-v 




THE OLD STONE WALL IN FRONT OF THE BURROUGHS HOME. 

BUILT BY DEACON SCUDDER. THE CATSKILLS 

DIMLY SHOW IN THE DISTANCE 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 25 

to get back upon ground of his own, we would 
never have had Wake Robin. Emerson had 
complete possession of him for a time and was 
hard to shake off, but constant writing upon 
out-door themes did the work, and put Bur- 
roughs back in possession of himself. 

In the year 1863, he went to Washington 
apparently to join the army, but somehow never 
did. Instead of this, he received an appointment 
in the Treasury, as a guardian of a vault, to count 
the money that went in or came out. During this 
time he had many leisure moments which he put 
to good account writing his nature sketches that 
make up his first nature book, Wake Robin. Be- 
fore he had been in the National Capital a great 
while he became acquainted with the poet Walt 
Whitman, and immediately fell in with him. 
Whitman's poetry was not new to Burroughs who 
had already developed a taste for it. The man 
Whitman seemed to be an embodiment of the 
poetry, Leaves of Grass, and Burroughs was so 
greatly moved by a study of the man that he soon 
began making notes of this study which resulted 
in his first book — Notes on Walt Whitman as 
Poet and Person (1867). This little volume is 
one of the best, raciest and freshest books on 
Whitman, and certainly is as readable as Bur- 
roughs' later book on Whitman: A Study, (1896). 

To any man, who would rise in the world, one 
thing must become evident; he must know that 



26 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

the idle moments must be the busiest of all. 
On this basis Burroughs worked. While at his 
work in the Treasury, he recalled his many ex- 
periences in the Western Catskills, and wrote 
these experiences. His Sundays and Holidays 
were spent in the woods around the National 
Capital that he may each season increase his 
knowledge about natural history. The Atlantic 
Monthly began to publish his nature papers 
about 1864, the year after he reached Washington, 
and has continued to do so at regular intervals 
ever since. In fact at the present time that 
periodical has three of Burroughs' essays yet 
unpublished. Wake Robin, a collection of these 
early nature sketches and his first book on out- 
door themes, was published in 1871, just four 
years after the little book on Whitman came 
from the press. Perhaps we have no more read- 
able book on bird life than this volume of nature 
sketches, which won for the writer immediate 
and complete success. 

Mr. Joel Benton formally introduced Burroughs 
to American literary people in the old Scribner's 
Monthly in 1876 while his third volume, Winter 
Sunshine (1875), was fresh in the mind of the 
public. In this timely article Mr. Benton claims : 
"What first strikes me in Mr. Burroughs's work, 
even above its well-acquired style, is the un- 
qualified weight of conscience it exhibits. There 
is no posturing for effect; an admiration he does 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 27 

not have he never mimics. We find in him, 
therefore, a perfectly healthy and hearty flavor. 
Apparently, he does not put his pen to paper 
hastily, or until he is filled with his subject. 
What has been aptly termed the secondary, or 
final stage of thought, has with him full play.. 

. A natural observer of things, 
he summons all the facts, near or remote — there 
is no side-light too small — and, when the material 
is all in, it seems to undergo a long incubation In 
his mind; or shows at least that reflection has 
done its perfect and many-sided work. Under 
his careful treatment and keen eye for the pic- 
turesque, the details get the proper artistic 
distribution and stand forth in poetic guise. The 
essay, when it appears, comes to us freighted 
with 'the latest news' from the meadows and 
the woods, and bears the unmistakable imprint 
of authenticity." This is a good testimonial 
from a good source, especially since it is the first 
public utterance of an opinion by an authority, 
on the quality of Burroughs's literary work. In 
a recent letter, Mr. Benton writes: "I did not 
say Burroughs was made by me, or that he re- 
members the priority of my article, but that I had 
the privilege and honor of being the first to write 
about him." This paper, I am sure, renewed 
his hopes for literary distinction and fame, and 
perhaps encouraged him to greater efforts. 

In Birds and Poets (1877), we find our nature 



28 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

student measuring other men's observations by 
his own deductions. He is beginning to branch 
out in literature and note nature references in the 
poets and now and then calls them to taw for 
stepping beyond the bounds of truth. Here we 
find Burroughs as much of a student of literature 
as he is of nature, and as delightful in his literary 
references as one could desire. Ten years after 
his appointment, he tired of his clerkship in the 
Treasury, as he resigned in 1872 to become receiv- 
er for a broken bank in Middletown, New York. 
Pretty soon after leaving Washington, he was 
made bank examiner for the Eastern part of New 
York State, which position he held till 1885. 
Since this last date he has depended entirely on 
literature and on a small farm for a livelihood. 
He purchased a place up the Hudson river at 
West Park about 1873 and began immediately to 
build a stone mansion which he named Riverby, 
and in which he has lived since its completion. 
But stone houses did not prove best suited for 
his literary work and he built a small bark covered 
study only a few yards from Riverby in which he 
has done most of his literary work. The most 
active period of his literary career was when he 
settled at West Park. Mention has already been 
made of Birds and Poets (1877). The magazines 
are full of his essays at this time and the volumes 
come thick in the blast: Locust and Wild Honey 
(1879), Pepacton and Other Sketches (1881), Fresh 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 29 

Fields (1884), Signs and Seasons (1886). The 
increased revenue from his books and literary 
work, supplemented by his little grape farm, en- 
abled him to resign as Bank examiner in 1885, 
as above suggested, and he has never held office 
of any kind since. It was about at the age of 
fifty that Mr. Burroughs seems to have developed 
a considerable consciousness of literature as an 
art, as a consequence of which we find him be- 
ginning to write papers on literary criticism and 
Indoor Studies (1889). From this time on his 
nature books are written in a different key, just 
as interesting but not quite as enthusiastic, and 
in most of them a touch of nature philosophy. 
In 1886 there appeared in the Popular Science 
Monthly an essay by him under the caption, 
Science and Theology, which showed pretty clearly 
the deeper currents of his mind. This paper was 
followed by others of its kind for several years 
until they were collected into a volume, The Light 
of Day, Religious Discussions and Criticism from 
the Naturalist's Point of View (1900). Studies on 
such themes are the logical outcome of the 
growth and development of a mind like that of 
Burroughs', and in the present case the papers 
are accompanied with that "unqualified weight 
of conscience" referred to in Mr. Benton's article 
and are valuable discussions on themes that never 
grow old. 

Again we find him delighting himself and the 



30 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

reading public on his out-door observations 
around Riverby (1894), his stone house by the 
Hudson, in the preface to which he expresses the 
belief that this is to be his last volume of out-door 
essays. Whitman: A Study (1896), and Literary 
Values (1902), are books for the critic and are 
fully up to the standard in that field of activity. 
This book on Whitman is claimed by many 
scholars to be the best criticism of Whitman yet 
published. It is a strong defense of the "Good 
Gray Poet" and his literary method. Beginning 
with the year 1900, and perhaps a little earlier, 
there developed a great demand from the public 
for a larger crop of nature books and a great 
many of our good writers, seeing this demand, 
began to try to fill it whether they were natural- 
ists or not, and the consequence was that a great 
many fake nature stories got before the reading 
public. This, of course, bore heavily on Mr. Bur- 
roughs' mind who had lived so long with nature 
trying to understand her ways and laws, who in 
1903 issued his protest against this practice in a 
strong article, "Real and Sham Natural History," 
in the March Atlantic Monthly of that year. 
This paper brought forth a warfare between the 
two schools of nature study in America, the 
romantic school and the scientific or the sane 
or sober school, which did not end till about 1908, 
and in fact, a little fruit of the controversy still 
crops out here and there in magazines and papers. 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 31 

In this controversy Burroughs won the battle of 
his life. The main point at issue was : Do animals 
have reason to any degree in the sense that man 
has reason? Burroughs claimed that they do 
not, and the romantic school claimed that they 
do, and to prove the claim hatched up a great 
many fairy tales about the animals and declared 
that these statements were made from observa- 
tions under their own eyes. Before it was over, 
Burroughs had won the strong support of Mr. 
Frank M. Chapman, the ornithologist; Dr. Wm. 
M. Wheeler, W. F. Ganong, and Mr. Roosevelt, 
then the President of the United States, together 
with a great many other distinguished naturalists. 

It was natural and fitting that Burroughs 
should be the first one to come to the rescue of 
popular natural history, when it seemed to be 
falling into the hands of romancers, as he was and 
is the dean of American nature writers and is our 
best authority on the behavior of animals under 
natural conditions. The result of this contro- 
versy was the publication of Ways of Nature (1905), 
containing all the papers which were the outcome 
of the currents of thought and inquiry that the 
controversy set going in his mind. The volume 
contains many fine illustrations of his claims and 
is a complete answer to the many attacks made 
upon him by his enemies in this controversy. 

At the urgent request of his many friends he 
collected in a volume and published his poems, 



32 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

Bird and Bough (1906), which for perfect cadence 
and simple sweetness have not been surpassed 
by any of our minor poems. In 1903, he went 
west with President Roosevelt and spent the 
month of April in Yellowstone Park studying 
natural history with him. The President sur- 
prised Mr. Burroughs in his broad knowledge 
and enthusiastic study of nature. The little 
volume, Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt 
(1907), contains an account of this trip and brings 
out Mr. Roosevelt's strong points as a naturalist. 
During the last few years his philosophy has been 
ripening and a great deal of his energy has been 
spent in working out natural philosophy rather 
than natural history, though he has never gotten 
away from the latter. His last volume of essays, 
Leaf and Tendril (1908), contains a resume of his 
studies along this line and are, perhaps, the most 
readable of all of his late books. Another volume 
of papers is now in the hands of the printers, which 
will likely appear in print next spring (1912). 

The names and dates of appearance of his 
many volumes are as follows, and mark the 
evolution of his mind: 

1867 — Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and 
Person. 

1871— Wake Robin. 

1875 — Winter Sunshine. 

1877— Birds and Poets. 

1879— Locusts and Wild Honey. 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 33 

1881 — Pepacton and Other Sketches. 

1884— Fresh Fields. 

1886 — Signs and Seasons. 

1889 — Indoor Studies. 

1894— Riverby. 

1896— Whitman: A Study. 

1900— The Light of Day. 

1902 — Literary Values. 

1902 — John James Audubon, A Biography. 

1904 — Far and Near. 

1905— Ways of Nature. 

1906— Bird and Bough. 

1907 — Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt. 

1908— Leaf and Tendril. 

This does not include a great many papers 
that were never printed in book form, nor many 
of his books and parts of them edited by other 
writers. This list is a good account of a life 
well spent, and treats of almost all phases of our 
American natural history. In the main, Mr. 
Burroughs has been a stay-at-home pretty much 
all his life, though he has been about some. In 
1872, he was sent to England, and returned 
there of his own accord in the eighties. An ac- 
count of these visits will be found in the two 
volumes, Winter Sunshine and Fresh Fields. 
From Alaska, 1899, and the island of Jamaica, 
1902, he brought back material for most of the 
volume, Far and Near. In recent years he has 



34 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

visited the Golden West and Honolulu, an account 
of which we shall doubtless see in his volume 
now in press. The best part of all his travels is 
undoubtedly his return to the simple life at 
West Park and Roxbury, New York. His little 
bark covered study near by Riverby, where he 
has done so much of his writing, was his first love 
up to a few years ago. At present, his Roxbury 
summer home, Woodchuck Lodge, seems to be his 
place of greatest interest. In either place, he 
can lounge about as he sees fit and feel at ease, 
as he can no where else. 

Wherever he goes he continues writing in his 
ripe old age, and only last summer (1911), com- 
pleted eight new essays while on an extended 
stay at Woodchuck Lodge. In the morning, 
from eight till twelve, he does his best work, and 
in the afternoon he rambles around the old place 
of his birth and among his neighbors. In the 
preparation of the above eight essays, he writes: 
" I lost eight pounds of flesh which I do not expect 
to regain." He is now beginning to "serenely 
fold his hands and wait" for the inevitable end, 
though the chances are he will live many years 
and win many battles against Nature Fakers and 
put many awkward students of nature in the 
paths of righteous observation. Strong and 
healthy, he can climb fences, ascend mountain 
heights with very little fatigue. Writing of his 
experiences with a party of friends in California, 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 35 

March, 1911, he says: "During the mountain 
climbing the other day, I set the pace and tired 
them all out. Mr. Brown, of the Dial, is sixty-six, 
but he had to stop and eat a sandwich and have 
some coffee before the top was reached." Not 
many of the school of literary men to which he 
belongs are now living. But what does he say 
to this: "The forces that destroy us are going 
their appointed ways, and if they turned out or 
made an exception on our account, the very 
foundations of the universe would be impeached. " 
If needs be, I am sure he can boldly and fearlessly, 

"Sustained and soothed 
By an unfaltering trust, approach the end, 
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams," 

and if needs be, I am as well persuaded that he 
can for another score of years, teach the world 
how to observe nature. He is optimistic and has 
always been, because he has always found plenty 
to do. His friends enjoy each victory he makes, 
and are glad to see so much interest center about 
his name as the years roll by. 



AROUND SLABSIDES AND THE DEN 

IT was a cloudy day in December when I 
made my first trip up the Hudson River to 
the home of John Burroughs, and how well 
I recall the invitation into the Den. On 
opening the door I stood face to face with the 
object of my pilgrimage, the distinguished natural- 
ist, a man of low stature, rather small frame, a 
well formed head and sharp eyes, and much 
younger in appearance than his photographs would 
indicate. His hair is white, but he can read 
without glasses and see birds better with the 
natural eye than I can. He had on a brown 
jersey wool coat or jacket, beneath which was a 
vest and trousers of spotted brown and dark to 
match, all of which were well set to his body and 
limbs. His shoes were of cloth and rubber with 
rubber bottoms. When he walked out he put 
on a short gray overcoat, a small crushed brown 
or gray hat, and arctic overshoes. His general 
appearance would not indicate that you were with 
John Burroughs, but if you got a clear view of 
his face and eye, you could not mistake him for 
an ordinary man. 

West Park, the little station on the West Shore 
branch of the New York Central and Hudson 
36 



AROUND SLABSIDES AND THE DEN 37 

River R. R., is a small village with not more than 
a hundred houses, and is quiet and almost puts one 
in a dreaming mood, when he thinks of being in the 
land of the great Literary Naturalist, who drew 
the most of his neighbors there. The Burroughs 
home, popularly known as Riverby, is in perfect 
keeping with the nature of the man. Hidden 
from the street behind a number of evergreens, 
it presents rather a secluded appearance, and is a 
part of nature rather than apart from nature. 
The house seems as if it sprang up from the soil, 
the lower half not yet above the ground. About 
twenty-five or thirty yards from the house is the 
study, which is pre-eminently the place of interest 
to the visitor. On entering this cozy little den — I 
found Mr. Burroughs reading Evolution and 
Ethics, by Huxley, and upon remarking that I 
noted what he was reading, his reply was that he 
had thought of writing something along that line 
and he wished to see what had already been said. 
"Right at this time," he said, "my mind is 
rather in a chaotic condition. I am not sure just 
what I shall hit upon next. I cannot definitely 
plan out my writing; but rather write when the 
mood comes on. I feel that I want to write on a 
particular subject and just get about it. " 

When I expressed my appreciation of his great 
service in the way of interpreting nature, and 
reducing life from the conventional to the simple, 
he remarked at once : " I have never run after false 



S8 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

gods, but have always tried to get at the truth of 
things, and let come of it what may. I do not 
believe in hiding the truth. Whatever I have 
accomplished in the way of writing, I attribute 
to this fact." This led me to ask him about 
"Real and Sham Natural History" (an essay 
written by him that appeared in the March 
Atlantic, 1903). He leant back in his chair and 
after a wholesome laugh, "Yes, I found it 
necessary to say something about the tendency 
of men like Thompson and Long who were taking 
advantage of their skill as writers and their 
popularity, to fool the people with those nature 
myths. If they had not advertised them as truth, 
it would have been all right. But when I saw that 
they persisted in teaching that the stories were 
true to nature, I could not stand it any longer. 
I just had to expose them! I could not rest till 
I had told the people that such stories were 
false!" Here Mr. Burroughs grew quite spirited, 
and his very manner indicated his lack of patience 
with those who make an effort to falsify nature. 
"I do not think that Long will ever forgive me 
for telling on him, but Seton Thompson is quite 
different. He seems to be all right and has shown 
me much courtesy at two or three dinners in New 
York. His wife, however, seems to have been 
hurt worse than Thompson himself. She is a 
little shy of me yet. I trust however that she 
will soon be all right. I have dined with them and 
she treated me very nicely. " 



AROUND SLABSIDES AND THE DEN 39 

"Are these the only two that were offended 
by the article?" I asked. "What do you think 
of Miss Blanchon?" 

"She is a very pleasing writer, and writes 
rather for the younger readers. She is generally 
reliable — never says a thing that she is not con- 
vinced is true. I have been out with her and she 
has a very keen eye. She reads nature well. I 
think she is a genuine nature student. " 

"I note that in the preface to your little volume 
of poems, some one could forgive you everything 
but your poetry. Who was so unkind to you?" 

After talking at length about the polemical 
essay, it interested me very much to hear Mr. 
Burroughs say that after all the article was prob- 
ably of passing importance only and had likely 
served its purpose, so let it drop. He had seen 
good evidence of the fruit it had borne. 

Already it had become evident that he was 
worried about this false spirit among certain 
unreliable writers, and soon he began to tell me 
of his new article soon to appear in Outing (and 
which did appear in the February number, 1907). 
He had no patience with these Fake writers, and 
did not see any reason for the editors to allow 
themselves to be duped in such a manner. I 
shall not forget the expression he used in portray- 
ing his efforts to deal with such writers. "I just 
'spank' them good for telling such lies. I have 
no patience with such writers, who doubtless are 



40 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

trying to follow in the steps of Long, and I cannot 
content myself to remain silent. If they did not 
vow that such stories were actual observations, 
I could forgive them. But here is where the 
danger comes." At times he showed his impati- 
ence, then he would tell one of these unbelievable 
stories, and burst into wholesome laughter. 
"Nothing but lies," he said. "A bigger lie was 
never told." 

After I had been gone for an hour to walk 
around the little West Shore station, I returned 
to the "Study" and found Mr. Burroughs cutting 
wood for his study fire. I said to him: "You still 
enjoy cutting your wood, do you?" "Yes," he 
says, "I find some daily exercise aside from my 
walks, necessary in order for me to keep my 
health. I feel better when I take my daily exer- 
cise. " 

"What kind of wood is this you use?" 

"Beech." 

When we had taken the wood to the study, 
the time had come for us to journey over the 
mountains to Slabsides, and that was what I was 
eager to do. For I was anxious to see the far- 
famed cabin in the woods. As we followed the 
beaten pathway up the rugged mountain side, 
Mr. Burroughs appeared perfectly at ease, and 
would tell of the famous visitors who had come 
along the same path with him to Slabsides. 

Nothing pleased him more than to speak of his 



AROUND SLABSIDES AND THE DEN 41 

high appreciation of President Roosevelt, and of 
the day the President and Mrs. Roosevelt spent 
at River by and Slabsides. 

"They came right along this path with me 
that warm August day in 1903. The President 
was full of life, and would jump and sport along 
the mountain path as a child would do. I am 
very much impressed with him as a man." 

"Do you remember the incident that occurred 
between you and the Chicago editor, where he 
spoke of you going to the Park to teach the 
President Natural History, in reply to which 
you state that President Roosevelt knew more 
western Natural History than four John Bur- 
roughs rolled into one?" "Yes, and I believe he 
does with reference to that big game in the west. 
You see he lived out west a great deal and has a 
very keen eye. Where did you see that?" 

"How did you enjoy your stay in the Park 
with the President?" 

"Oh! I had a very pleasant time except I got 
quite tired often and it was cold out there. The 
ground was covered with snow all the time." 

Directly we were beyond the loftiest part of 
the mountains in a roadway, and with all the 
anticipation of an enthusiast, I said! "What 
clearing is that in the distance? Is that Slab- 
sides on the right there? O, I shall never forget 
this moment!" 

Mr. Burroughs answered in a very quiet way: 



42 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

"Yes, there is the little house called Slabsides, 
which you have heard so much about, and the 
clearing beyond is my famous celery farm." 

Now we were almost in front of Slabsides and 
Mr. Burroughs cast his eyes to the ground and 
saw by the roadside a small flower in which he 
manifested much interest, and called my attention 
to it. But my eyes were fixed on the very odd, 
yet beautiful house, that we were about to enter. 
The thought that here is a house that nature 
lovers, literateurs, college boys and girls, business 
men, working men, and all classes and conditions 
of humanity had made pilgrimages to see, caused 
my first sight of it to sink deeply into my heart. 
The house was so well suited to its environment 
that one might call it Nature's own. The bark 
covered slabs out of which it was built, the rustic 
looking doors, floors and steps, made me happier 
than anything I had ever seen, except the man 
who built it and called it home. The scattered 
shelves on the rustic walls filled with all kinds of 
books indicated what the house was built for. 
The table on one side of the room, covered with 
papers of every description, and letters, the little 
ink-well and goose quill pen, all contributed to my 
interest in the place. On the table lay a book 
containing a list of the names of visitors to Slab- 
sides, in which I was asked to write my name. 
By this time Mr. Burroughs had found a letter 
from President Roosevelt which I read with con- 



AROUND SLABSIDES AND THE DEN 43 

siderable anxiety. It was full of sane and healthy 
thoughts. 

Mr. Burroughs did not fail to express his high 
regard for the President. 

The plain open fireplace and the cooking uten- 
sils scattered in the room were all suggestive of 
Mr. Burroughs' philosophy of life; plain living and 
high thinking, or as Thoreau would have it, " Les- 
sening the Denominator. " 

To my surprise, there was an upstairs to Slab- 
sides, and the great philosopher and poet, on tak- 
ing me up in the second story of his little house, 
told me that he had entertained more than a half 
dozen men and women, two or three days at a 
time, at Slabsides. 

On returning to the sitting room, we rested for 
a short while, during which time I asked him some 
questions on the American poets. He was at 
home in that field, and freely expressed himself. 
I asked what he thought of Longfellow, and if he 
had ever seen him. "No," said he, "I never 
had but one opportunity of seeing him, and 
thinking that I might have a better some day, 
neglected that, but Longfellow died before another 
opportunity presented itself. I think he was a 
real poet, and I like him very much. He was 
not elemental like Whitman, nor as serious as 
Emerson, but wrote some fine verse. " 

"Do you enjoy your stay over here at Slab- 
sides?" 



44 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

"Yes! But not like I did a few years ago. 
Nature appeals to me here as it does nowhere 
else. I built this house in order to get further 
away from the conventionalities of life, and to 
get a first hand acquaintance with Nature. The 
Hudson is such a highway for the yachts of mil- 
lionaires of New York and other cities, that I 
wanted to withdraw into the wilderness, to get 
back from the river, and live close to Nature's 
heart, and I bought this little place. It has given 
me a great deal of pleasure, and I have never had 
cause to regret the investment. " 

Around Slabsides have been built a number of 
other summer houses, probably the most inter- 
esting one of which is that of Ernest Ingersoll, 
who is a warm friend of John Burroughs, and 
who bought his land from the latter on which to 
build. 

It was of much interest to me to hear the dis- 
tinguished Naturalist tell of his celery farm, and 
the ancient lake bottom in which it is located. 
To the south of the little farm is a spring which 
we visited at his suggestion. For the spring is 
one of the integral parts of Slabsides and the 
celery farm. While standing at the spring, and 
discussing the little farm generally, we heard 
distinctly the whistle of a bird in upper air, which 
he told me was that of a pine grosbeak come down 
to spend the winter. I rejoiced to hear also the 
sound of the goldfinch. 



AROUND SLABSIDES AND THE DEN 45 

When I was leaving Slabsides, I could not help 
but turn back two or three times to get another 
and yet another glimpse, for I had been helped 
by my visit, my soul had been enriched, and I was 
loath to wind around the mountain path, beyond 
the eminence behind which I could no longer see 
the never-to-be-forgotten little sylvan home. I 
could not help but say to the naturalist that 
Thoreau and Walden Pond had been on my mind 
much of the hour. 

Before we reached the Den, I expressed my 
appreciation of "Bird and Bough," and remarked 
that the poems were quite musical and suggested 
the power of natural objects to incite poetic 
vision, and my belief that such poetry would have 
a tendency to influence the poets of the future, to 
sing more songs of. nature. About this time we 
entered the Den again, where John Burroughs 
gave free expression to his feelings in reference to 
his own poems. He would have it, that there was 
more truth than poetry in them, that there was 
some real good natural history in them. 

I referred to some of his critics and what they 
had said about him, and could not help but feel 
deeply impressed with his wholesome view about 
the whole question of literature. "These things 
do not worry me at all. I take the position that 
any man's writings must live by merit alone, and 
the bad will drop out and the good live on. Every 
writer must be judged finally, by whatever of his 
writings that stand the test of time. " 



46 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

Just as I heard him make these remarks I arose 
to bid the great philosopher good-bye, for it was 
nearing train time and I had to return to New 
York that evening. 

The day had been an epoch making day for me. 
I had long loved the writings of John Burroughs, 
and had had some correspondence with him, but 
now for the first time, had my fondest hope 
come true. His whole air is one of pleasantness 
and when he speaks he says words of wisdom. 
Frequently as I sit in my study, I live that day 
over, and live in the hope of making many other 
pilgrimages to Riverby and to Slabsides, and of 
bringing away renewed inspiration from the poet- 
naturalist. 

His conclusions in natural history are reached 
after careful study and the closest observation, 
and are not to be controverted. I was much 
impressed with his keenness of intellect and 
frank confessions. He predicted the controversy 
in the school of nature writers, which was so 
noticeably before the public last year, 1907-1908, 
and assured me of the necessity of calling a halt on 
the Fake Natural History writers, whose stories 
have duped so many of the Magazine editors. 
Most of these Fake writers are masters of the 
English language and to their credit be it said, 
are able to make the stories sound well and catch 
the public mind, and if they would only advertise 
them as myths, they would be of great educational 



AROUND SLABSIDES AND THE DEN 47 

value to the public, but when such myths 
are held to be actual occurrences in Nature, they 
destroy the usefulness of such talent, and tend to 
place editors at a discount. The new writers may 
consider themselves in advance of the old school 
naturalists, and more in keeping with the progres- 
sive age in which they live, but give me the man 
or the school that does not trifle with facts in all 
his nature pictures. Give me the man or school 
that sees wisely and turns the mirror up to 
nature. This is what we have in White, Thoreau 
and Burroughs. 



JOHN BURROUGHS IN THE SOUTH 

I 

SHALL I ever forget the morning that 
JohnjBurroughs, a basket in one hand and 
hand bag in the other, walked up from 
the train to my house? 
His eyes caught a glimpse of every bird on the 
ground, in the trees and in the air above, and he 
would rejoice saying: "I hear the thrasher some- 
where!" "There is a robin!" "How many 
jays you have down here!" "There is a tree in 
full bloom ; it looks like one of the plums ! " These 
bits of natural history made him feel at home, 
and as if he were among his neighbors. Every 
flower seemed to be a revelation and an inspiration 
to him, and his very love for them proved a great 
inspiration to me. He noted with special em- 
phasis that our Spring in Georgia is at least a 
month earlier than theirs in New York. The 
weather was ideal while Mr. Burroughs was here, 
and, as a result of this, he would often, while 
walking in the late afternoon, speak of the saffron 
sky and of the season it foretold. 

When urged to feel at ease, he would reply: 
"I want to invite my soul; just walk around and 
take things easy. I like to saunter around." 
48 



JOHN BURROUGHS IN THE SOUTH 49 

It is remarkable to see how vitally all objects of 
natural history affect him now, and he 72 years 
of age. They seem to be a part of him. Go to 
Nature with him and you will be especially im- 
pressed with his remarkable keenness of percep- 
tion, and ability to read and enjoy the 'fine print 
and foot notes.' He looks into the secrets of 
Nature and interprets them. He goes to the 
woods because he loves to go. When he returns 
he tells, in his essays, just what he saw and felt. 
In the evenings his conversations lead up to these 
things, and the philosophy of natural history. 
He will be found putting two and two together 
to make four, and of course when he finds that 
some other writer on these matters makes five 
out of two and two, he knows it and is ready to 
challenge it. 

Few men are so prominently before the 
American world of letters at this time as John 
Burroughs, and any incident in his life interests 
a great many people. He has long been consider- 
ed the Dean of American Nature writers, and his 
essays for the past few years have been drifting 
toward human interests. Now he is working 
out a complete system of philosophy about human 
and animal life, and is at the same time, in a 
certain sense, a check upon our present crop of 
Nature writers. No time in the history of any 
literature has the tendency been so strong to 
exaggerate about every-day occurrences, as it is at 



50 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

this time among American Nature writers to tell 
incredible stories about our remaining wild ani- 
mals and birds. It is this unwarranted tendency 
that brings forth from Mr. Burroughs such 
essays as "Real and Sham Natural History," or 
"The Credible and Incredible in Nature." 
Under normal conditions, he is a calm, peaceful 
prophet of Nature, but try to perpetrate upon 
the reading public such stories as I have suggested 
above, and he buckles on his sword and goes forth 
to set straight the crooked paths. 

The difference in the time of printing the books 
is not greater than the difference in the nature of 
the contents of Wake Robin (1867), and Ways of 
Nature (1905). The former is the plain and 
simple record of the observations of an enthusias- 
tic lover of Nature, while the latter goes into 
animal psychology and natural philosophy, with- 
out showing any loss of enthusiasm manifested in 
the first. 



II 



His visit through the South during the Winter 
and early Spring of 1908, is rather significant, 
especially among his literary and Nature-lover 
friends. It is another evidence of his determina- 
tion to understand Nature under all conditions, 
and removes far from us the idea that he is a 
local figure like Thoreau or White. 



JOHN BURROUGHS IN THE SOUTH 51 

When it was known that Mr. Burroughs in- 
tended to spend part of the Spring of 1908, travel- 
ing through the South and visiting in Florida, 
nothing seemed more fitting than to have him 
stop in Georgia. This he consented to do, and 
was with us a week beginning March 4. As 
soon as he consented to visit in Georgia, an effort 
was made to have him meet "Uncle Remus,' ' 
and Mr. Harris was invited to call on Mr. Bur- 
roughs, but on account of sickness that finally 
got the better of Mr. Harris and caused his death, 
July 3, also on account of business details during 
the combining of The Home Magazine with 
Uncle Remus's Magazine, the two men did not 
meet. In expressing his regrets, "Uncle Remus" 
wrote of his debt and relation to Mr. Burroughs 
as follows: 

"There is not in the wide world a man whom 
I would rather meet than John Burroughs. He 
is the only man in the country who is living the 
ideal life. I have just been re-reading his essay 
on Walt WTiitman, and I feel closer to him than 
ever. There are some details of the deal with 
the Western Magazine still to settle, and I am 
sorry indeed, not to be able to accept your invita- 
tion. I thank you for thinking of me. Give Mr. 
Burroughs my love. 

Faithfully yours, 
"Joel Chandler Harris." 



52 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

Both of these men have lived the simple life, 
and yet, "Uncle Remus" thought that "Oom 
John," as Mr. Roosevelt calls Burroughs, was 
the only man in the country living the ideal life. 
One thing is evident, no man ever enjoyed life 
more than Mr. Burroughs, and as per his own 
statement, work has been the secret of his hap- 
piness. "Oh, the blessedness of work," he says, 
"of life-giving and life-sustaining work! The 
busy man is the happy man; the idle man is the 
unhappy. When you feel blue and empty and 
disconsolate, and life seems hardly worth living, 
go to work with your hands, — delve, hoe, chop, 
saw, churn, thrash, anything to quicken the pulse 
and dispel the fumes. The blue devils can be 
hoed under in less than a half hour/' 

This, he goes on to say, is his own experience, 
and therefore he has always found something to 
do. Not many days ago he wrote: "I have 
recently got to work again and hope to keep at 
it." And he will keep at it as long as life shall 
last. 

Mr. Burroughs was born April 3, 1837, on a 
small farm amid the Catskills at Roxbury, New 
York, where he lived during the early years of his 
life. The love of the farm still clings to him, and 
you will frequently hear him say, "Anything that 
savors of the farm is very pleasant to me, and 
recalls my early years at Roxbury on the old 
home farm." He belongs to that class of men 



JOHN BURROUGHS IN THE SOUTH 53 

who got an education by working most of the 
time and going to school when there was little 
work to do. In order to gain his way to the 
academy, he had to earn his own money, as his 
parents were poor and there were nine children in 
the family. To earn the necessary money, he 
taught school and with the money he thus earned, 
went to Ashland Academy. Afterwards, he 
closed his school days at Cooperstown in 1854, 
where he studied one term. Upon leaving school, 
the spirit of adventure seized him, and he went 
to Illinois and spent some time teaching. But 
because of the girl he loved, he soon returned to 
New York, and married in 1857, while teaching in 
a small town in the east central part of the state. 
The two have enjoyed a wide acquaintance among 
the literary characters of America for the last half 
century. To them has been born one child, 
Julian Burroughs, who is already known in the 
literary world as a Nature writer. 



Ill 



Mr. Burroughs was teaching when his first essay 
was accepted and printed in the Atlantic Month- 
ly, November, 1860. He continued teaching till 
1863, when he went to Washington City to enlist 
in the army, but finding many objections to such 
a life, he entered the Treasury Department in 
January, 1864. Here he served in various capaci- 



54 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

ties, and finally became chief of the organization 
division of the Comptroller of Currency. In 
1873, he resigned to become receiver of a bank in 
Middletown, N. Y. He was afterwards made 
bank examiner in the Eastern part of New York 
state, which position he held till 1885. Since 
then he has relied on his writings and his fruit 
farm for a living. 

He has always been an optimist, and at 72 
years of age is full of sunshine. In religious belief 
he is perhaps, a fatalist. He is willing to bide his 
time fearlessly, for his portion. His experience 
is largely a home experience, though he has been 
to England twice, to Alaska once, and to the 
island of Jamaica, and for the past two years has 
spent his winters in California and Hawaii. 
These visits have each been the inspiration for 
several essays. His literary work has always 
been a labor of love, and with these few exceptions, 
together with several short papers on men and 
literature, his essays have been the outgrowth of 
his contact with Nature up on the Hudson River 
and around Washington City. His books number 
18 volumes of essays and one volume of poems. 
Since the recent school of Nature fakers has come 
so prominently into public notice, his mind has 
shown remarkable activity in his efforts to hold 
Nature writers to the truth. Only a few years ago 
he added some land over the mountain to his 
estate, and in a beautiful rich valley, about a 



JOHN BURROUGHS IN THE SOUTH 55 

mile from Riverby, he has built with his own 
hands, out of rough bark-covered slabs, his rustic 
retreat called "Slabsides." For several years 
he has spent part of his time in this primitive- 
looking house, which he says was built because 
he wished to get back to Nature. Many books 
and periodicals are in this sylvan home, and its 
owner has often spent days at a time there, com- 
muning with Nature, and taking notes on the 
return of Spring, the songs of new bird visitors, 
and the ways of wood folks. Nothing has ever 
ra ade so deep an impression on the writer as the 
sight of Mr. Burroughs in and around " Slabsides.'' 

No man of the century has put himself in an 
attitude to get more out of life than Burroughs. 
His peace of mind and satisfaction with life as he 
finds it and makes it, are largely responsible for 
his power as a writer. No man can read his sane, 
wholesome truths about Nature, men, and litera- 
ture, without growing better and more satisfied 
with life, and more resigned to the ways of the 
Powers that be. 

Most of what follows is the result of conversa- 
tions in the evenings with Mr. Burroughs on 
natural history, literature and people, the three 
things about which he talks very freely when 
you know him. The first evening he was with 
us the discussion led to his recent essay, "The 
Divine Soil," and he, with a soul full of this 
interesting subject, went into the matter at 



56 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

length, giving his idea of Man and Nature, of the 
possible age of the earth, and the gradual wearing 
away of the continents. As well as I remember, 
he said: 

"It will take only about 6,000,000 years— a 
brief period in the history of creation — for all the 
continents to wear away, at the present rate. In 
trying to indicate what is meant by the long 
periods of time that it has taken for Nature to 
reach the present stage of development, one 
author used this figure: That it had existed and 
had been forming as long as it would take to 
wear away the Alps Mountains by sweeping 
across them with a thin veil once every thousand 
years. 

" What progress man is making upon the earth ! 
At the present rate, he will soon be able to harness 
the winds, the waves of the sea and even the tide 
waters. He will store up electricity in batteries 
to be used at his will. All these things will be- 
come necessary when the population grows out 
of proportion to our present resources. No 
doubt man's progress will be as great in the future 
as it has been in the past, and just what he will 
be found doing when all the present supplies of 
Nature are exhausted, no one can tell. One 
thing becomes evident, he will learn to use much 
of the energy that is now lost. Necessity will 
soon become the mother of many inventions. 

"The largeness of the Universe has always 




AT THE BARS IN FRONT OF THE OLD HOME BURIAL GROUNDS 



JOHN BURROUGHS IN THE SOUTH 57 

been a subject of much thought for me. I like to 
think that we are making our voyage on such a 
large scale. The Heaven and Hell that we used 
to hear so much about, are no longer considered 
the one up and the other down. There is no up 
nor down in Nature, except relative to our own 
earth. The farthest visible star, so many million 
times a million miles away, is only a short distance 
in infinite space, from which we could doubtless 
see as much further, and as many more worlds as 
we now see from our old earth. I like Whitman 
because his largeness puts one in tune with 
Nature in the larger sense. No other poet with 
which I am acquainted, gives one such large and 
wholesome views about the world in which we 
live." 



IV 



On the following evening, which was the even- 
ing of -March 5, Mr. Burroughs entered fully into 
a discussion of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. 
His conversation ran about as follows: 

"Thoreau was somewhat eccentric and did 
not reach a large class of people like Emerson, 
who always savored of youth, and stimulates all 
who read him. Thoreau was original, however, 
and his books breathe the breath of real things. 
Whitman was larger than Thoreau, and encom- 
passed the whole world, instead of a little nook of 



58 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

the woods like Walden Pond. He used to break- 
fast with us on Sunday mornings when we lived 
in Washington, and he never reached our house on 
time for meals. Mrs. Burroughs would fret and 
worry and get hot while the breakfast would get 
cold. One moment she would be at the door 
looking down the street, another she would be 
fanning with her apron, wishing that man would 
come on. Presently, Walt could be seen, and he 
would swing off the car, whistling as if a week was 
before him in which to get to his breakfast. To 
have him in our home was a great pleasure to us. 
He always brought sunshine and a robust, vigor- 
ous nature. Once Mrs. Burroughs had prepared 
an extra good meal, and Walt seemed to enjoy it 
more than usual. After eating most heartily he 
smiled, saying: 'Mrs. Burroughs knows how to 
appeal to the stomach as Mr. Burroughs does to 
the mind.' I often saw him on the front of a 
horse car riding up the streets of Washington. 
Far down the street, before I could see his face, 
his white beard and hair could be seen distinctly. 
He usually rode with one foot upon the front 
railing, and was with Peter Doyle, a popular 
cab driver, oftener than he was with any one 
else. Doyle was a large Irishman with much 
native wit, and was a favorite of Whitman's. 

"The Atlantic is my favorite of American 
periodicals, and I like to see my papers printed in 
it. It seems always to hold to a very high 



JOHN BURROUGHS IN THE SOUTH 59 

standard of excellence. I remember well when 
the magazine was launched in November of 1857. 
I was teaching at the time, and having purchased 
a copy, in the town in which I was teaching, I 
returned home and remarked to Mrs. Burroughs 
that I liked the new magazine very much and 
thought it had come to stay. Somehow, the con- 
tents made me feel assured of its success. I was 
married in September before the magazine 
appeared in November. My first essay was 
printed in the Atlantic in November of 1860, 
three years after it had been launched. I was 
very proud, indeed, when I had received the 
magazine and found my own work in print in it. 
The essay was "Expression" and was purely 
Emersonian. Now I knew it would never do for 
me to keep this up, if I hoped for great success. 
This essay was so like Emerson, that it fooled 
Lowell, the editor of the Atlantic, and Mr. Hill, 
the Rhetorician, who quoted a line from it giving 
Emerson as the author. (Here Mr. Burroughs 
laughed.) You know, it was not customary to 
sign names to articles written for periodicals in 
those days. I was so much worried about this 
Emersonian mask that I resolved to lay it off. 
So I began to write of things that I knew about, 
such as birds and flowers, the weather and all 
out-door Nature. I soon found that I had hit 
upon my feet, that I had found my own. 
"The title of my first book was 'Notes on 



60 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

Walt Whitman as Poet and Person,' and was 
published in 1867. Later I wrote a book on 
* Whitman: A Study.' Since I first turned atten- 
tion to Whitman, he has never released hold upon 
me. I found a more wholesome air in his than in 
any other poetry, and when I met him and learned 
to love him, his attractive personality strengthened 
my love for his writings. He is the one mountain 
in our American Literary Landscape. There are 
some beautiful hills. 

"I don't seem to be in a mood to write poetry. 
One cannot write when he thinks to do so. He 
must have a deep consciousness of his message, if 
he would say something that will hold water. 
Probably I shall find my muse again some day; 
I don't know. 

" I have always been a lover of the farm. I am 
a man of the soil. I enjoyed the smell of that 
manure as we passed up the road today. It 
recalled my early days when I used to put it out 
on the farm. Anything that savors of the farm 
and of farm life is pleasant to me. Nothing makes 
me happier than my annual visits back to my old 
home in the Catskills. W'hen Mrs. Burroughs 
and I decided to buy a home and move away from 
Washington, I could not decide just where 
would be best for us to settle, so we thought to get 
near New York and at the same time as near the 
old home as possible. We have enjoyed our life 
at Riverby very much, and it is convenient in 



JOHN BURROUGHS IN THE SOUTH 61 

every way. We have a great many visitors, and 
like to see them come. 

" At this time America has no great writer, but 
many who use pretty English. They seem to 
have no great message. Stedman wrote well, but 
his essays always savored too much of the mid- 
night oil. They read as if the best of his energy 
had been spent in something else, and the tired 
mid-night hours turned to literary work. They 
are not fresh like Lowell's essays. I do not think 
anything he wrote has lasting qualities, with the 
possible exception of two or three poems. Al- 
drich wrote sweet verse, but it is sweet in the 
sense that a peach or a plum is sweet. It has no 
fast colors. Trowbridge is one of our best 
present-day writers, and much of his work will be 
unknown to the next generation. He is a man of 
attractive personality and exceptionally pleasing 
manners. Mrs. Burroughs and I have, for a long 
time, enjoyed his friendship. As for my own 
writings, I sometimes wonder just how they have 
affected people, and what my life has meant. I 
have always hoped that some would be helped 
by my books. A short time ago, I had a letter 
from a preacher in the upper part of New York 
state, who had just finished a book on * The Gospel 
of Christ,' and he asked me if I would write a 
book on ' The Gospel of Nature.' After I received 
the letter and began to think about the matter, I 
was much perplexed as to whether there is a 



62 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

gospel of Nature. I have since then written 
something along the line suggested, but I do not 
know whether it will ever appear in print. It is 
always interesting to have suggestions from any 
one about what I should write. Writing is more a 
product of the soul than of the will. 

"I once asked President Roosevelt what he 
would do when he left the White House. He 
replied quickly : 'Oh, I'll find plenty to do. Don't 
worry about that.' And he will find plenty to 
do. He is a man of intense activity, and will al- 
ways be happiest when he is busiest. I admit 
that he takes large liberties as the executive of 
the nation, but he is a natural leader and controller 
of men. W T hen he sets his head to do a thing, he 
keeps digging away till it is done. He is full of 
resources. I have just received a letter from 
him consenting to be interviewed by my friend, 
William Bayard Hale. Hale is a good man, and 
will give a most reliable account of his visit to the 
White House. " 

John Burroughs, who is destined to be called 
"the good gray naturalist," is a man who enters 
freely into the life of those who admire him and 
his writings. Recently it was my delight to read 
and discuss one of his short poems, " The Return, " 
with Mrs. Burroughs, and I could not resist the 
temptation to remark that Mr. Burroughs must 
have been home-sick for the old place when he 
wrote it. 



JOHN BURROUGHS IN THE SOUTH 63 

The wife said: "Yes; you have no idea how 
true that is! Mr. Burroughs often goes back to 
his old home at Roxbury, up in the Catskills, and 
walks over the farm and through the woods 
where he used to go when he was a boy, and he 
always tells me how sad it makes him feel. I 
sometimes think that he would like to live his 
life over, he has so many fond memories and 
pleasant recollections of his early life." 

The Return 

He sought the old scenes with eager feet, 

The scenes he had known as a boy, 
" Oh, for a draught of those fountains sweet, 

And a taste of that vanished joy!" 

He roamed the fields, he wooed the streams, 
His schoolboy paths essayed to trace; 

The orchard ways recalled his dreams, 
The hills were like his mother's face. 

O sad, sad hills ! O cold, cold hearth ! 

In sorrow he learned this truth- 
One may return to the place of his birth, 

He cannot go back to his youth. 



RAMBLES AROUND ROXBURY 



TO one who is interested in the most 
beautiful things in nature a day trip up 
the Hudson by boat in mid-summer is 
a real treat. Here you get a general 
idea of the palisades and are far more impressed 
with theirbeauty and significance than is possible 
whenf taking a hurried trip by rail. You are 
constantly shifting the scenes from hill to hill, 
from mountain to mountain and from outline to 
outline, each scene characterized by its particular 
fascinating beauty, till you reach the climax as 
you approach the Highlands. Here you get the 
best the Hudson has to offer, and you almost feel 
suddenly lifted above yourself as you approach 
these round mountain peaks clad in dark and 
light green, and reflected almost as perfectly in 
the calm gentle flowing river. 

An additional charm is added to the trip as 
you approach West Park, as mall station on the 
West Shore Railroad, about five miles above 
Poughkeepsie, the home of John Burroughs, the 
great literary naturalist, the interpreter of Nature, 
the delightful man of many parts. From the 
64 




EATING RASPBERRIES ON THE SITE OF HIS GRANDFATHERS 
HOUSE, LONG SINCE TORN AWAY 



AROUND ROXBURY 65 

boat you can see Riverby, his stone house, and the 
small bark coverd study near by. Perhaps if he 
were here, we could see him in the little summer 
house overlooking the river, taking his mid-day 
rest. But he is back at the old home farm in the 
western Catskills, at Roxbury, enjoying again the 
scenes of his boyhood, or better, as he himself puts 
it, "drinking from the fountains of his youth." 
From time to time, he goes back to his native 
heath and rambles over his favorite boyhood 
haunts, and climbs the hills and stone walls he 
used to climb. He was born in a farm house in 
one of the valleys just above the little town of 
Roxbury, to the northwest, on one of the best 
farms in that part of the state of New York, and 
the homing instinct appeals to him no more than 
the desire to get back to the farm he helped 
develop, and to enjoy the free open air of the hills 
and mountains. 

"Well, you did come didn't you," are the first 
words he spoke as I stepped off the afternoon 
train from Kingston Point. Yes, he was there 
and what a warm and welcome hand-shaking he 
gave me! Soon plans were perfected for our 
journey up the hill from the railway station to 
Woodchuck Lodge, a farm house where Mr. 
Burroughs keeps house of late years while he 
visits his old home. This house is on the south 
and west edge of his brother's farm, in the direction 
of the station, and is a comfortable place for his 



66 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

summer work. He thinks that he will fit it up and 
spend part of every summer in it as long as he 
lives. John Burroughs had been tramping all 
day with some friends, and but for his vigor of 
manhood, would have been too tired to meet the 
train that afternoon, but one of the party said he 
was right in for meeting the train, and never 
thought of yielding the task to another. When 
he gets back among his native hills he is no longer 
aged, despite his gray hairs, nor does he credit his 
own lines, "One may go back to the place of his 
birth, He cannot go back to his youth. " Here he 
is back to his youth and it is not to be denied. 
He is as optimistic as any young man ever was. 

With all his optimism, however, there are many 
sad hints mingled. Before we had readied Wood- 
chuck Lodge, he pointed many scenes of his 
childhood, and said in a little undertone: "These 
are the scenes upon which my eyes first opened, 
and I sometimes think I would not mind if they 
closed for the last time upon them. I would not 
mind if I come to the end of my journey right here 
among these hills." As we went slowly up the 
hillside, he began pointing out the many places of 
interest about the town, among which was the 
Roxbury Academy, a large two-story frame build- 
ing, that he longed to attend as a young man but 
never did. The academy looked about as it did 
sixty years ago, and was conducted practically 
along the same lines. Many modern ideas and 



AROUND ROXBURY 67 

methods had crept into the curriculum, but the 
tendency was to stick to the traditions of the 
past. "This little brook here used to be a 
famous trout stream when I was a boy. Many 
are the times I have fished up and down it when 
a bare-foot boy, and have caught some fine fish in 
it too. They are all about gone now, so many 
people have moved in and taken the timber from 
the valley of the brook, and have fished it out. 
We shall go up by the edge of that pond and 
follow the trail around the upper end of it, instead 
of going around the roadway. In this way we 
can make our walk some shorter." His mind 
wandered from one thing to another as he led the 
way up the hill. Now he would be pointing out 
some interesting flower or plant, now some bird 
or nest, and in it all he found joy and, as truly, 
shared it with me. 

The small artificial pond we were passing was 
stocked with fish, and I was told by the keeper 
had a half million trout in it. Pointing back 
toward the town Mr. Burroughs said: "Over there 
is the famous Gould Memorial Church, built by 
Helen Gould, and just to the left of the church you 
will see the Gould home, in front of which is a 
beautiful park." As we approached the upper 
end of the pond he saw a gopher run up 
a tree and disappear in a hollow, a sight 
he had never witnessed before, and he 
remarked with some pride: "One never gets too 



68 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

old to learn. I thought I knew the gopher pretty 
well, but this is the first time I ever saw one 
hide himself in a tree after that manner." 
About this time a hyla sounded his familiar note 
in a small tree just across the brook, and Mr. 
Burroughs hastened to that part of the bog and 
lingered about this tree till we heard a vesper 
sparrow singing his evening hymn on the stone 
wall just beyond the bog. "I never tire of such 
music as that. The vesper sparrow sings for me 
many months in the year and has been doing so 
as long as ever I can remember, but its music is 
as fresh and sweet today as it was the first time I 
ever heard it. There is something strange about 
the constancy of nature and the inroads she 
makes upon one's mind and soul." It would 
hardly be a mistake to say that the appeal which 
nature makes to John Burroughs has kept before 
him all these years high ideals and a great purpose, 
and has been responsible for his success as a 
writer. He has been constant in his love for and 
devotion to nature, but has had to wait (and he 
has done it patiently) for the great welcome the 
world is now giving him. His circle of admirers 
was very much restricted for many years during 
the beginnings of his literary career, but he kept 
before him the lessons of nature, and never lacked 
for enthusiasm to reflect truth when the appeal 
came. 

The afternoon was beautiful. As we ap- 



AROUND ROXBURY 69 

proached Woodchuck Lodge the shadows were 
growing long and dim, and the sky was beginning 
to turn saffron, but there was some signs of dis- 
contentment in the weather, which did not fail to 
bring fruit before morning, for there was a strong 
wind from the east before mid-night, which brought 
clouds with a little sprinkling of rain and a con- 
siderable drop in temperature before morning. 
The walk had ended and we were tired, but how 
refreshing was the shredded wheat and fresh 
sweet milk, the home-made loaves, the maple 
cookies (Mr. Burroughs boyhood favorites) and 
the beautiful white honey. This repast was fit for 
a king, and served in this simple manner, tasted 
better than it would have on any king's table. 
Whatever else he was doing, once in awhile I 
could hear him sigh : " I get so home sick for these 
dear old scenes of my early days! I cannot stay 
away from them long at a time! I come back 
every year and spend some time following up the 
paths I helped to make around the old home 
place! Mrs. B. used to come with me, but she 
doesn't enjoy it now like she did years ago. It 
is the best of tonics for me. " 

After the evening meal, Mr. Burroughs took me 
over to the old Burrough's home, where his brother 
now lives, and who could have experienced greater 
pleasure than I, when it was announced that I was 
to occupy Uncle John's room for the time of my 
stay! To think that I should look out from the 



70 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

windows that he looked from, and would see the 
scenes that inspired him so much during the 
formative period of his life, was all joy to me. 
To know the interesting family of his brother, and 
to sleep under the roof that had for so many years, 
brought happiness to the man whom I had gone 
far to see, these were experiences that add much 
to one's resources of life. Here in this beautiful 
valley among the hills of the western Catskills, 
nestled the village in which grew the boy who 
now, at seventy three years young, brings people 
from all parts of the world to his door. A man 
who has put man and Nature on good terms and 
brought happiness to thousands of homes. No 
wonder he sighs for the hills and for the home of 
his youth! They gave him his first love for 
Nature. 

His interest in the affairs of the farm was keen. 
He would ask his nephew: "How is your crop of 
oats turning out? Aren't you afraid to leave the 
shocks in the field too long? I should think they 
would begin to rot. When are you going to cut 
the field up by the road?" Nothing of interest 
about the farm escaped his attention, and though 
his interest was altogether a personal interest, 
you would think he was getting half the revenue 
of the crop. 



AROUND ROXBURY 71 

II 

Before going to the woods and mountains the 
next morning, Mr. Burroughs showed me a copy 
of the Atlantic Monthly containing his essay, 
"Expression," published in November, 1860, and 
asked if I cared to read the essay. I found it 
interesting and as perfect a piece of work as 
John Burroughs ever did. It begins : " The law of 
expression is the law of degrees, — much, more, 

most There is no waste material in a 

good proverb; it is clear meat like an egg, — a 
happy result of logic, with the logic left out, and 
the writer who shall thus condense his wisdom, 
and as far as possible give the two poles of thought 
in every expression, will most thoroughly reach 
men's minds and hearts." Thus ends the first 
paragraph of the essay, and it continues to abound 
in Transcendentalism to the end. The following 
is the last and much quoted paragraph : " Johnson's 
periods act like a lever of the third kind, the power 
always exceeds the weight raised." It is filled 
with proverbs and brilliant thought. Perhaps it 
is Emersonian, but certainly it is different from 
anything Emerson ever did. It is so entirely 
different from anything else Burroughs did that 
one can hardly feel while reading it that he is 
following after the author of "Wake Robin," or 
"Winter Sunshine. " It is so well done, however, 
that one cannot help but feel that if he had given 



72 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

himself over to that form of literature, he would 
have rivaled Emerson, or any other writer, in that 
field of expression. 

Wake Robin, though keyed in a much lower 
tone than the essay, is as fresh as the morning 
dew, and sparkles as much, and we cannot help 
but feel that Mr. Burroughs did the proper thing 
when he came down from his high perch of Trans- 
cendentalism. 

After breakfast was over, and the chores were 
done, we prepared for the morning tramp in the 
hills. Our itinerary, which had already been 
mapped out by Mr. Burroughs, lead down the 
road by the old home farm and up the lane beyond 
to the south and east. In the corner of a meadow, 
to the right of the road beyond the Burroughs' 
house, is an old family grave yard, and when we 
reached this, Mr. Burroughs stopped and gave a 
little history of the farm and of several of the 
people who had been planted there in the city of 
the dead. " Ezra Bartram owned this farm before 
father, and sold it to father. Bartram built the 
house in which I was born. When I was a young 
boy father built the house you see down there now. 
Edna Bartram, the grand-daughter of Ezra, was 
my first sweetheart and I recall now just how she 
looked." We entered the old grave yard from 
the bars in the stone fence, and Mr. Burroughs 
had much pleasure reading the names and telling 
of the people who were buried there. When he 




RESTING UNDERNEATH A CATSKILL LEDGE WHERE HE HAS 
OFTEN BEEN PROTECTED FROM THE RAIN IN SUMMER 



AROUND ROXBURY 73 

came to the name of Jeremiah Dart, he recalled 
that he had three sons, Dave, Abe and Rube, and 
that Rube once worked for his father. The 
Scudders were teachers and preachers. The 
Corbins were successful farmers and respectable 
people. "Deacon Jonathan Scudder had a farm 
joining father's farm on the southwest, and well 
do I remember how straight he was. The Deacon 
built that fence over there beyond our farm, and 
I can see him now as straight as a rod, picking up 
stones in that pasture. He never bent except at 
the hips. How he ever built that wall is a puzzle. 
But he was forever going through the pasture 
picking up stones and putting them on the fence 
one by one. He was thrifty and always had 
things done right about him." Mr. Burroughs 
went on across the grave yard and came to a 
name that interested him a great deal. "Nath 
Chase was the first to introduce top-knot chickens 
in our community, and O how I wanted some of 
those chickens!" 

From this grave yard we went over the hill to 
the east, following the public road, till we came 
to a large patch of raspberries on the left of the 
road, which were growing in a hole surrounded by 
heaps of stone and brickbats. Mr. Burroughs 
did not tell me why his fancy led him there, but I 
knew when he told me that his father was born 
there, and that it was his grandfather's place. 
He was loath to leave here, but sat down on one 



74 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

of the old timbers in the centre of the place where 
the house stood and ate raspberries for some 
time. "How delicious these berries are! Far 
better it seems to me than any cultivated berries 
that ever grew. " Having said this, he gave me a 
handful that I might try those he himself was 
gathering. From this place we went to the site 
of his grandfather's barn, where Mr. Burroughs 
discovered a few years ago his father's initials cut 
in a slab of stone. "These letters, 'C. A. B.' 
stand for Chauncey A. Burroughs, my father, 
born in 1803, who must have cut them here 
many, many years ago . I was very glad to 
make the discovery." 

Just as we began our journey toward the 
nearby woods, he pointed out to me the little 
red school on the edge of the opposite hillside, 
where he got most of his education. "That 
school and the grounds about it, are about as 
they were when I was in school there over sixty 
years ago. The house was painted red then as it 
is now, and on some of the old seats I can see where 
some of my schoolmates cut their names. " The 
call of a sharp shinned hawk attracted our attention 
from the school house, to the woods. Now we 
halted for several moments in the lower edge of 
the meadow. Mr. Burroughs thought they must 
have found some prey and that we might see what 
it was if we kept still and quiet. But the hawks 
went across the valley in the direction of the 



AROUND ROXBURY 75 

school house and we never saw what was the 
cause of the disturbance. 

Going south from here, we came to some 
beautiful woods, at the bottom of which flowed a 
clear cool brook. At the upper edge of the hill 
was an outcrop of stratified rock. This was of 
the greatest interest to the naturalist, who, just 
back from the petrified forests of Arizona and the 
Yosemite valley, where he had enjoyed the com- 
panionship of John Muir, was chuck full of Geology 
and the Geological history of the earth . " You can 
see the effects of water in this perfect stratification 
here," he would say, as he pointed out the leaves 
of stone so perfectly marked there in the hillside. 
" If we could just roll back the pages of history a 
few millions of years, we could read some interest- 
ing and wonderful stories of the formation of 
Mother Earth's crust. Just look at the wave 
marks of the sea along the edges of the hill ! How 
I wonder if old Triton did not have a great task 
allaying the waves that folded these pages! O 
what a small part man plays in the history of the 
earth ! The creature of the hour and a mere speck 
on the face of nature." There is a sadness and 
sweetness in the associations with a man like this, 
and I could not help but think of Wordsworth's 
little poem as I listened to John Burroughs tell 
about his idea of the earth in its relation to man, 
and of how little man studies Mother Earth. 



76 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

"The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers : 
Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
This sea that bears her bosom to the moon ; 
The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers; 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune; 
It moves us not. — Great God ! I'd rather be 
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

There is kept before your mind the unquestion- 
able seriousness of the influences of cosmic forces; 
the effects of an intimate relationship with Nature. 
Burroughs always sees the better and larger side 
of things. You never hear any of the nature 
prattle so common among the less serious students. 

At this moment the red-eyed vireo burst in 
full song only a few feet from us and a Rubenstein 
would not have commanded our attention quick- 
er. "The little fellow is doing almost the work 
of two, "said the naturalist, so fluent was the song. 
He came within close range and softened down 
into a low mellow song, whereupon Mr. Burroughs 
remarked: "His audience is not quite as large as 
he first thought, so he is tuning his harp down 



AROUND ROXBURY 77 

accordingly." Here we came into the settle- 
ment roadway and returned to the Lodge for 
dinner. 

Ill 

In the afternoon, we set out early from Wood- 
chuck Lodge for a long tramp through the pasture 
south of the Burroughs farm and in the direction 
of the Nath Chase farm . Back through the woods 
between the Lodge and the old farm, were scattered 
apple trees, which had some apples on them. 
Mr. Burroughs told something of the history of 
some of these apple trees, that they had been 
grafted many years ago by his father, and that 
others had been planted by the cattle as they 
followed the pathway through this pasture. 
There were signs that the gray squirrels had 
been eating the apples. We saw several piles of 
chips and a few apple seeds scattered on the wall 
fence, which the squirrels had chosen for a festal 
hall. On this wall, the naturalist would lean and 
look off over the hills toward the town of Roxbury, 
and tell of the neighbors who had settled this field 
and that. His mind sometimes seemed to be on, 

"Far-off things, 
And battles long ago. " 

Suddenly he looked around and said: "It's sweet 
to muse over one's early years and first experi- 



78 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

ences. I was just thinking of the many times I 
had gone through these woods. But O, how I 
dislike to see these trees cut down for wood, 
when so many are already down and rotting. 
This patch of woods extended to the bottom of 
the hillside, when I was a boy, and I think it was 
much prettier then than it is now. ,, A very 
interesting piece of natural history pointed out to 
me beyond this pasture, was the tendency of 
birch to trace its roots over large areas of stone 
almost barren of soil. It has a preference for 
rocky places. The root of this tree will sometimes 
trace a small crevice in the stone twenty or thirty 
feet and does not seem to reach into any soil 
throughout its whole length. 

At the edge of the flat grass covered hill beyond 
the pasture, was a perpendicular wall of several 
feet in height, — the outcrop of the same stratifi- 
cation of stone we had observed during the earlier 
part of the day. A number of birch roots had 
reached all the way down to the bottom of this 
ledge and fastened themselves in the soil below. 
Several phoebe nests had been built on the 
shelves of rock along under the ledge, which the 
naturalist pointed out to me. Under one ledge 
that extended over at least twelve feet, was a 
phoebe's nest that Mr. Burroughs thought had 
been there for more than a quarter of a century. 
On the table of rock beneath the nest was a pile of 
waste ten or twelve inches in height, and there 



AROUND ROXBURY 79 

was enough material in the nest itself to build 
more than a dozen phoebe's nests. The place 
was so inaccessible to other animals, that the 
birds took advantage of this, and doubtless made 
of it hereditary property, handing it down from 
generation to generation since its discovery. 

Passing on down through the Scudder pasture 
toward the lower woods, to the south, we met a 
lad herding cattle for the night, and after a few 
words with him, we turned to the left and went 
up the side of a steep hill through a deep hemlock 
forest. This was a pretty hard climb, and I kept 
looking for Mr. Burroughs to stop and blow a 
little, but not a bit of it. He took the lead and 
kept up the climb without even a hint of exhaus- 
tion. In fact, I had begun to wish that he would 
stop and rest for a moment, when pointing up to 
a white wall of stone he said, "There is the Old 
Gray Ledge. It looks like a white house from 
here. This is one of the most beautiful places 
you will find in this part of the Catskill mountains, 
and O, the times I have come here for rest and 
study!" There is a rough broken surface of 
rock wall at least seventy-five feet high, all 
covered with moss and lichens, and almost as 
gray as whitewash on a stone house. In the 
hemlocks toward the valley from here, are hun- 
dreds of fine timber trees, and we could hear among 
them nut-hatches, chickadees and titmice. We 
spent almost an hour about this beautiful place, 



80 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

discussing in a friendly way, neighbors and people, 
great and small. Our next task was to get to the 
top of the Old Gray Ledge, which we did by going 
a little distance south and picking the place that 
showed the least resistance. The woods on the 
top of the Ledge were level and consisted of much 
shrubbery and some large hardwood trees and a 
few hemlocks and pines. We soon came out of 
the woods to the west and entered a pasture on 
the Nath Chase farm, from which we could see 
across the beautiful valley to the south and many 
mountain peaks, among which were a few that 
Mr. Burroughs said he could see from the top of a 
mountain by Slabsides, down at West Park. 
This was the connecting link between the old and 
the new home. 

Turning around, we could see to the north 
across the valley, in which was the Burroughs 
farm and the Old Clump beyond. There was a 
swift breeze from the Dortheast and the air was 
quite cool for the early part of August. But 
after our climb up The Old Gray Ledge, it was 
quite wholesome and renewed our strength. The 
pure swift mountain breeze fitted well with my own 
feelings, for I had begun to feel the effects of a 
steady pull up the hill and needed oxygen and 
ozone. But best of all, I had enjoyed the day 
with the man who brought the pleasures of the 
woods and the mountains to me, and I felt that I 
had been blest. I had felt the sympathies and 




A CATSKILL MOUNTAIN SIDE WHERE THE PHCEBE BUILDS 



AROUND ROXBURY 81 

love of a strong poetic pulse. I had a glimpse of 
something that, 

"Made the wild blood start 
In its mystic springs,' ' 

and I wondered if we have any greater heights to 
look forward to! I wondered if we should ever 
find in the trackless paths of eternity a joy that 
would eclipse this! I thought I had learned 
"that a good man's life is the fruit of the same 
balance and proportion as that which makes the 
fields green and the corn ripen. It is not by some 
fortuitous circumstances, the especial favor of 
some god, but by living in harmony with immut- 
able laws through which the organic world has 
evolved, that he is what he is. " We reached the 
Lodge just as the sun was going down, and soon 
the evening meal was over. I went back across 
the hill to the old home for the night, and as I 
passed down the road way, I called to mind many 
things that had interested me during the day. 
After I had retired for the night and sleep had 
been induced, the joys, the pleasures, the happi- 
ness of the day, haunted me in my dreams, and I 
knew that I had * staid my haste and made delays, 
and what was mine had known my face.' 



THE OLD CLUMP 

IT is Sunday morning, and the mists are 
beginning to roll away and the summer sun 
of August just beginning to smile once more 
upon a world of beauty and of love, after 
the ugly days during the latter part of the week. 
The cattle are lowing to the north and to the 
south, and the shadows of the clouds are floating 
o'er the meadows less swiftly. The mountain 
peaks are clearing up after their cloud-baths. 
When I reached the Lodge in the early morning, 
I found John Burroughs preparing breakfast, and 
I brought the water and the wood and stirred 
the malted wheat while he prepared some other 
foods. 

After the meal was over, I read the papers and 
walked around in neighboring meadows, while 
Mr. Burroughs went down to the home farm for a 
pail of milk. The flickers were playing in the 
corner of the pasture to the south, and the gold- 
finches seemed to be feeding their young in the 
large apple trees across the road, but I never 
found a nest. To the west I saw an indigo bird 
flitting about some shrubbery by the stone fence, 
which attracted me that way. I thought perhaps 
something had disturbed the birds' nest, but I 



THE OLD CLUMP 83 

looked in vain for some vindication of my sus- 
picion. 

By this time, Mr. Burroughs had returned and 
all were ready to begin our climb to the summit 
of the Old Clump, the mountain most beloved 
of all by the naturalist, and the one about which 
he speaks oftenest. His father's farm extends 
far up the southeast side of this mountain and, 
of course, he played on and about it when he was 
a young boy. The face of this mountain doubtless 
made inroads on his character, and stimulated 
him to a love of nature. For on the summit of it, 
he sits or rolls and dreams of former — and he 
almost thinks better — days. 

Here on the summit of this mountain is where 
Mr. Burroughs wrote, " Mid-summer in the Cat- 
skills," August, 1905, which is possibly the best 
poem he ever wrote, with the exception "Waiting/' 
Just as we had left the Lodge, we came to a tree 
under which was a large boulder The naturalist 
mounted this boulder and sat for a moment 
sighing: "How many times, I have played upon 
this rock when I was a boy. I remember mother 
used to look this way when she did not find us 
about the house. ,, Below this boulder, two of 
the small boys in the party found a vesper spar- 
row's nest, in which we all became interested, but 
in order to get back to dinner we must be away 
and up the mountain. To go straight up the side 
of the Clump would have been a hard climb, so 



84 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

we went angling across toward the east, and after 
passing the boys' sleeping place in the trees, we 
turned back to the north and west, following the 
old pathway that leads from the Burroughs farm 
to the mountain top. Not far had we followed 
this path before we came to a spring flowing with 
cool, clear water, and nestled in the side of the 
mountain. Here we all quenched our thirst, 
Mr. Burroughs taking the lead. "Many times 
have I quenched my thirst here at this spring," 
he said. "The Naiads have welcomed me here 
for more than sixty years, and still they guard 
this sacred fountain for me. Narcissus meets me 
here every summer with refreshing beauty after 
my hard pull up the mountain. I still join the 
great god Pan in making love to the wood nymphs 
hereabouts. O, there are so many ways of getting 
ap piness in these places Imagine how delight- 
ful it was to hear the voice of John Burroughs as 
he told these stories of his love for these his native 
scenes! There was every indication that he was 
experiencing much happiness as he recalled his first 
walks up the mountain and of his first sight of that 
spring. 

The mountain woods were beautifully decked 
with flowers everywhere, the antenaria perhaps 
taking the lead so far as numbers go. This was 
particularly plentiful about the top of the moun- 
tain. Soon we were on the highest peak from 
which we could see the many neighboring peaks 



THE OLD CLUMP 85 

in all directions, and the blue folds of the ridges, 
layer upon layer for many miles to the south and 
east. What a fine view-point ! The exhilaration 
of the mountain air, how much it means after a 
long hard climb! Down in the valley are mark- 
ings of the farms with the long straight stone 
fences, so delicate and so finely drawn! The 
panoramic view of the valleys present the color- 
ings and fine markings of maps on the pages of a 
book, but much more beautiful, and in these parts 
more perfect. The liquid depths of air and long 
vistas are a feast to the eyes. 

I was anxious to know where Mr. Burroughs 
was nestled on this lofty peak when he wrote the 
poem of which mention has been made, and asked 
him to point out the place when we reached it. 
"It is over near the northeast edge of the summit, 
and we shall soon be there. " As we pushed our 
way between two large boulders where, Mr. 
Burroughs told us it had long been the custom for 
young men to kiss their girls as they helped them 
through there, and of the many he, himself, had 
kissed there, we came to a large open grassy spot. 
Here the naturalist sat down and rolled over in 
the grass, indicating that he had at last reached 
home. About twenty paces off toward the eastern 
edge of the mountain top, was a large flat rock, 
almost as level as a table top, just beneath which 
was a fine growth of large trees, the tops of which 
were a little above the table of stone. "Here, " he 



86 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

said, "is where I began writing 'Midsummer in 
the Catskills'." 

The poem begins as follows : 

"The strident hum of sickle bar, 
Like giant insect heard afar, 

Is on the air again ; 
I see the mower where he rides 
Above the level grassy tides 

That flood the meadow plain." 

"I remember," he says, "on that day I saw, in 
the field toward the Betsy Bouton place, the 
cradlers walking through the fields of grain, and 
it made a deep impression on me. " 

"The cradlers twain with right good will, 
Leave golden lines across the hill, 

Beneath the mid-day sun. 
The cattle dream 'neath leafy tent 
Or chew the cud of sweet content 

Knee-deep in pond or run. " 

We could see the cattle in the nether pasture 
on the old Burrough's home place, and my mind 
was full of the above lines which I had com- 
mitted to memory when they were first printed. 

"The dome of day o'erbrims with sound 
From humming wings on errands bound 
Above the sleeping fields. " 



THE OLD CLUMP 87 

What a picture of bees in the upper air freight- 
ing honey from field to hive and storing it away 
for the winter supply ! The two following stanzas 
perhaps interpret the beauty of the situation 
better than any other part of the poem : 

" Poised and full is summer's tide 
Brimming all the horizon wide, 

In varied verdure dressed; 
Its viewless currents surge and beat 
In airy billows at my feet 

Here on the mountain crest. 

"Through pearly depths I see the farms, 
Where sweating forms and bronzed arms 

Reap in the land's increase; 
In ripe repose the forests stand 
And veiled heights on every hand 

Swim in a sea of peace. " 

The truth of these lines lay out before us. 
There lay the grain in the fields where the 
cradlers had reaped in the land's increase. There 
stood the veiled heights on every side which John 
Burroughs named beginning on the right: Table 
mountain, Slide mountain, Double Top mountain 
and Graham. From the front of Woodchuck 
Lodge he had already named for us Bald Moun- 
tain, Hack's Flats, Schutle's and the one we were 
now on. Truly they were all veiled heights 



88 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

as we viewed them from the summit of the Old 
Clump. 

As I loitered about among the boulders on the 
mountain I became much interested in the names 
cut in the large boulders of people who had lived 
in the Burroughs community, and seeing that 
Mr. Burroughs himself was also interested in 
them, I began to ask him about them, and I 
copied many of them in my note book. Nothing 
pleased the Naturalist better than to tell of the 
people who used to be his neighbors, and I think 
he remembered them all. As we looked out 
again across the valley, his eyes got a glimpse of 
the old Betsy Bouton place, and he recalled that 
she was a widow who had one daughter and two 
sons. "These were the laziest human beings I 
ever saw, — these boys. They would sit up by 
the fire and mumble, while the mother brought in 
the wood and the water, and cooked the meals, and 
the daughter would do the milking. Nothing 
could the mother get out of them, but to sit around 
the open fire and grumble at their hard lot, and 
that they had so much to do. She used to have a 
hard time get ting them up and ready for school. " 

From here we could see the vicinity of the 
little red school house where John Burroughs had 
gone to school sixty years before, and he told of 
his experience with Jay Gould. Jay paid him 
for writing an essay, and he paid Jay eighty cents 
for a grammar and an algebra. "These were my 




% 



UNDER THE OLD GRAY LEDGE 



THE OLD CLUMP 89 

first grammar and algebra, and I paid for them 
with the money I had earned selling sugar from 
my individual boiling pan in the sugar bush. I 
shall tell you about it and show you where I 
boiled the sugar, as we go down that way. " 

He enjoyed telling of one certain student — a 
schoolmate of his who had long curly hair. "His 
hair was as curly as you ever saw and turned 
under at the bottom. O, how I longed to have my 
hair look like his did! I thought it was the 
prettiest hair I ever saw grow." 

Our descent from the mountain top was easy. 
We followed the path to the right coming down, 
and the decline was a little more gradual. The 
upper Burroughs pasture extended almost half-way 
up the mountain side. It was separated from 
the lower pasture by a stone wall. I never saw 
so many stones and small boulders in one place as 
I saw in this lower pasture. The ground was 
almost covered. There was certainly a much 
larger crop of these than of grass. Here I thought 
Deucalion and Pyrrha must have failed to convert 
stones into people, but continued throwing, even 
to the tiring of Jupiter's patience. Rolling them 
down the long steep hill afforded some fine sport 
for us. Mr. Burroughs told of a very interesting 
incident in his early life. " I remember, " he said, 
"when I was a young chap I used to roll stones 
down this hill very often. One day I got a large, 
round boulder high up the mountain side and turn- 



90 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

ed it loose with a good push. Those bars down 
there had just been finished by father and had 
cost him considerable work and worry. The stone 
was heavy and was almost a disc, and had gathered 
considerable momentum as it neared the base of 
the hill, and ran directly into the bars and literally 
knocked them to pieces. Perhaps I could not 
have remembered the incident so well if this had 
been all, but as a further reminder, father gave me 
a pretty severe lashing. I remember how out of 
patience he was at my carelessness. " 

Passing through these bars we went through 
the sugar maple bush, that had longer than he 
could remember, supplied the family with syrup 
and sugar. The old vat and the furnace were 
there and the shell of a house to ward off the cold 
winds of April, 

"While smoking Dick doth boil the sap." 
I was thinking of Spring Gladness, and The Com- 
ing of Phoebe, 

"When buckets shine 'gainst maple trees 
And drop by drop the sap doth flow, 

When days are warm, but nights do freeze, 
And deep in woods lie drifts of snow, 

When cattle low and fret in stall, 

Then morning brings the phoebe's call, 
'Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe'." 

As we came down to the roadway that leads 
from the old farm to Woodchuck Lodge, Mr. Bur- 



THE OLD CLUMP 91 

roughs pointed out to us a junco's nest just out- 
side the road. This nest had afforded him much 
pleasure during his present stay up at Roxbury, 
as he saw it two or four times a day, as he passed 
by on his way to his brother's home for milk. 
On the crest of the hill between the two houses — 
the old home and Woodchuck Lodge — I stopped 
and looked for several moments at the place of 
the naturalist's birth, and at the farm, with all the 
beautiful meadows and pastures, for I knew that 
I would not see them again soon. When it was 
told me that all these meadows and woods and 
stone walls, look now as they did sixty and more 
years ago, I could understand how a country lad, 
born and reared among such scenes, could grow 
into a great naturalist. I could now enjoy and 
understand some of the qualities of his literary 
productions. The country was a new one to me 
and altogether unlike any I had seen, but having 
tasted of it through the medium of good litera- 
ture, I was prepared to make the best of my op- 
portunity to study it. What particularly im- 
pressed me, and what was so different from the 
scenes of my childhood, was the buckwheat fields 
dotting the meadows here and yonder, and the 
long straight stone fences marking the meadows 
and hillsides. "These walls were built by a 
generation of men that had ginger," Mr. Bur- 
roughs said, "a quality so much lacking these 
days." 



92 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

No words could express the happiness that had 
come to me during the week that I was rambling 
through the Catskills. While going down through 
the meadow in front of Woodchuck Lodge, on my 
way to the railroad station, I seemed to be flooded 
with memories of a happy experience. These 
memories still haunt me and may they continue 
to do so even unto the end of time. I had 
learned better than I ever knew, that "this 
brown, sun-tanned, sin-stained earth is a sister 
to the morning and the evening star," and that 
it has more of beauty and love written on it 
than has ever been read by all the poets in the 
distant ages past; that there are still left volumes 
for the interpreter. I had taken a little journey 
in the divine ship as it sailed over the divine 
sea. I had heard one talk of the moral of 
the solar system, — of its harmony, its balance, 
its compensation, and I thought that there is 
no deeper lesson to be learned. 



JOHN BURROUGHS AS POET 

A few years ago Herr Brandes, the great 
French critic, in commenting upon the 
method of criticism used by Saint 
Beuve, sounded a pretty harsh note 
to the old school of critics, on method and material 
in poetry, which in a measure explains what I am 
about to say of the poetry of John Burroughs. 
"At the beginning of the century,'' he says, 
" imagination was considered the essential quality 
in poetry. It was his capacity of invention which 
made the poet a poet; he was not tied down to 
nature and reality,, but was as much at home in 
the supernatural as in the actual world. But as 
romanticism, by degrees, developed into realism, 
creative literature, by degrees, gave up its fantastic 

excursions into space It exerted 

itself even more to understand than to invent." 
An observer cannot fail to see in modern poetry 
a tendency to beautify objects of nature, and facts 
of science. Past ages were taken up with the 
heroic, the legendary in poetry. Legends were 
creations of the mind and in turn subjects for all 
poetic effort. Some moral and spiritual lesson 
or truth, must be taught by the introduction of 
ideals drawn purely from imagination. Such an 
93 



94 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

ideal was many times created for the special lesson 
at hand. The Homeric poems, Virgil's Aeneid, 
Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise 
Lost, are all poems of this character. They are 
founded on the unknown and the unknowable, 
yet they bring to us suggestions that inspire us 
and make us better for having read them. Milton 
never knew how Paradise was lost, nor even that 
it ever was lost. Dante did not know the history 
of the departed soul, nor did Homer and Virgil 
know what part the gods and heroes played in 
the fall of the city of Troy, nor has the riddle of 
the origin of the Latin and Greek races ever been 
written. Yet such themes give us pleasure when 
they come from the great poets, who actually 
believed what they were writing to be true, and 
the poems themselves will live forever. 

We have reached a new order of things in the 
present era of the world's history, and we must 
look to something else for poetic inspiration, as 
well as to interpret the origin of things in the 
light of the last word on evolution. The minor 
poets have about worn these old themes thread- 
bare, and the public mind is beginning to look to 
something else for entertainment. People are 
now seeking the poetic interpretation of facts 
of science and of nature, and the poet of the future 
will have the peculiar task of giving us new eyes 
with which to see truth, instead of leading us 
into fields of fancy. 



JOHN BURROUGHS AS POET 95 

John Burroughs is an interpreter of this latter 
kind. He has gone to nature with the poet's eye, 
and has needed no fiction to get us interested in 
what he is trying to tell us. The facts need only 
to be seen with the poet's eyes to make them 
beautiful, and he has translated them in terms of 
the human soul, without having to create beings 
of fancy to interest us while he tells the message. 
This is what differentiates his prose and poetry 
from the poetry of the past. It is true, he ranges 
from the commonplace to the sublime, but in 
it all with unfaltering devotion to truth, which 
should be the aim of every poet and is the aim of 
every true poet, despite the claims of some that 
literature is only to entertain, and should never 
be taken seriously. If it is not serious, it is not 
literature, and if it, is serious, it will always have, 
as its entering wedge, some fundamental truth. 
The whole aim of Burroughs is to lead humanity 
into the proper method of interpreting the truths 
of nature, and if all his poetry is not the best, he 
has sacrificed poetry rather than truth and owns 
up to it like a man. He says : " My poetry is not 
the free channel of myself that my prose is. I, 
myself, do not think that my poetry takes rank 
with my prose." His best poetry takes rank 
with his or any body's prose. Replying to some 
questions with reference to Mid-summer in the 
Cat skills, Mr. Burroughs says: "It was an at- 
tempt to paint faithfully, characteristic mid-sum- 



96 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

mer scenes of that locality. I do not think it 
ranks high as poetry, but it is true. The genesis 
of such a poem, or of any poem, is hidden in the 
author's subconsciousness. " Perched on a moun- 
tain top that overlooked the beautiful valleys 
amid the Catskill mountains, and seeing the 
many activities of farm life in August, Mr. Bur- 
roughs saw the beauty and simplicity of the 
situation, and could not forego his duty of telling 
it to the world. 

"The strident hum of sickle-bar, 
Like giant insect heard afar, 

Is on the air again; 
I see the mower where he rides 
Above the level grassy tides 

That flood the meadow plain. " 

From beginning to end the poem paints the 
rural life amid the Catskills in its busiest season, 
and associates with it all the best in Nature. 
It is literally a poet's vision of his own country, 
after many years absence from the fields he 
paints. How many times he himself has gone. 

"Above the level grassy tides, 
That flood the meadow plain," 

but perhaps without seeing the beauty that the 
scene now brings to him. 







OX THE SUMMIT OF THE OLD CLUMP, LOOKING IN THE VALLEY 

BELOW "WHERE SWEATING FORMS AND BRONZED ARMS 

REAP IN THE LAND'S INCREASE" 



JOHN BURROUGHS AS POET 97 

Far different from this is his first poetry, which 
is the expression of a youth groping in the dark 
for some unknown god, with his only guide that 
of faith in the world, faith in himself and faith in 
his fellowman. He says of his early poem: 
"Waiting was written in 1862, during a rather 
gloomy and doubtful period of my life. I was 
poor, was in doubt as to my career, did not seem 
to be able to get hold of myself, nor to bring 
myself to bear upon the problems before me. 
Yet underneath all was this abiding faith that I 
should get what belonged to me; that sooner or 
later I should find my own. The poem was first 
printed in the old Knickerbocker Magazine of 
New York, in the fall of 1862. I received nothing 
for it. I builded better than I knew. It has 
proved a true prophesy of my life. " 

"Serene I fold my hands and wait, 
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; 

I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate, 
For lo ! my own shall come to me. 

"I stay my haste, I make delays, 
For what avails this eager pace? 

I stand amid the eternal ways, 

And what is mine shall know my face. 

"Asleep, awake, by night or day, 
The friends I seek are seeking me; 



98 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

No wind can drive my bark astray, 
Nor change the tide of destiny. 

"What matter if I stand alone? 

I wait with joy the coming years ; 
My heart shall reap where it hath sown, 

And garner up its fruits of tears. 

"The waters know their own, and draw 
The brook that springs in yonder heights; 

So flows the good with equal law 
Unto the soul of pure delights. 

"The stars come nightly to the sky; 

The tidal wave unto the sea; 
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, 

Can keep my own away from me." 

It is this willingness to wait the results of his 
efforts without fretting or worrying, to which Mr. 
Burroughs owes his success. This I think, is what 
has toned and sweetened his prose and poetry, 
and makes him so readable. He looks for 
truth and finds it, and lets it ripen into expres- 
sion in his mind, and we get the good after the 
smelting process has completed its work, and the 
dross all worked off. The above poem has been a 
true prophesy of his life. His own has come to 
him, and he is now experiencing the richest reward 
for his long years of waiting and patience. If 



JOHN BURROUGHS AS POET 99 

too much success comes to us in the beginning 
of any career, the career is most likely to suffer, 
or possibly better, we are likely to develop a little 
vain glory and never return to the proper attitude 
to truth and service. Mr. Burroughs in his plain 
simple way has been 'still achieving, still pursuing,' 
and has long since learned 'to labor and to wait.' 
His attitude toward his work is almost as pleasant 
as the work itself. Never in a hurry — though he 
always manages to get much done. The melan- 
choly days have been 'few and far between* with 
him, though we do see some few sad but whole- 
some lines in his poetry. These almost sound 
like some homesick visitor in a foreign land. 
The following from the poem, "In Blooming 
Orchards," is a good illustration of this: 



"My thoughts go homeward with the bees; 

I dream of youth and happier days — | 
Of orchards where amid the trees 
I loitered free from time's decrees, 

And loved the birds and learned their ways. 

"Oh, orchard thoughts and orchard sighs, 

Ye, too, are born of life's regrets ! 
The apple bloom I see with eyes 
That have grown sad in growing wise, 

Through Mays that manhood ne'er for- 
gets." 



100 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

"The Return" is another of his poems in which 
this longing for the days of his youth crops out : 

" O sad, sad hills ! O cold, cold hearth ! 

In sorrow he learned this truth — 
One may go back to the place of his birth, 

He cannot go back to his youth. " 

Again in "Snow Birds" he says: 

"Thy voice brings back dear boyhood days 
When we were gay together." 

His contact with outdoor life and his habits of 
observation are unmistakably those of a poet. 
"In the rugged trail through the woods or along 
the beach we shall now and then get a whiff of 
natural air, or a glimpse of something to 

"Make the wild blood start 
In its mystic springs." 

Burroughs says himself, 'the very idea of a 
bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. 
How many suggestions to the poet in their flight 
and song! Indeed, is not the bird the original 
type and teacher of the poet, and do we not 
demand of the human thrush or lark that he 
shake out his carols in the same free manner as 
his winged prototype? The best 



JOHN BURROUGHS AS POET 101 

lyric pieces, how like they are to certain bird- 
songs! — clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting 
that challenge and triumph which the outpouring 
of the male bird contains.' Again he says 'Keats 
and Shelly have pre-eminently the sharp semi- 
tones of the sparrows and larks.' 

But what shall we say of Burroughs? His 
poetry is somewhat matter-of-fact, like the songs 
of the Indigo bunting and the Thrushes, and we 
cannot help but feel that the songs of these birds 
had the effect on him that Burns speaks of in one 
of his letters: "I never hear the loud, solitary 
whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the 
wild, mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in 
an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation 
of the soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or 
poetry." Verily he has achieved his purpose. 
'He has brought home the bough with the bird 
he heard singing upon it. His verse is full of the 
spirit of the woods and fields; the winds of heaven 
blow through it; there is the rustle of leaves, the 
glint of sunlight; the voices of the feathered folk 
are present. One finds himself in touch with out- 
doors in every line.' O, what a blessing when 
one can drink from the great fountain of Nature ! 
When one can be so inured with the larger and 
more wholesome truths of the universe that he 
forgets to fret and to make records of the negative 
forces of the world! This we claim is pre-emi- 
nently true of Burroughs. He tells truths about 



10S RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

Nature in his simple, musical verse, and almost 
vindicates Wordworth's definition of poetry : "The 
breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' * or "The 
impassioned expression which is in the counten- 
ance of all science." I would almost say of him 
what Dry den said of Chaucer: "He is a perpetual 
fountain of good sense." Perhaps Mr. Dowden, 
in speaking of Coleridge's poetry, comes nearer 
than any one else to the truth about Burroughs' 
poetry. "These poems contemplate and describe 
Nature in a resting and meditative temper. 
There is no passionate feeling in their delight. 
The joy he has in the beauty of the world is the 
joy of dreaming, often only a recollected joy in 
what he has seen. He found in poetry, paths of 
his imagination. The pensiveness, the dying fall, 
the self -loving melancholy, are harmonized by 
him with Nature." Thoreau says in one of his 
books : " Very few men can speak of Nature with 
any truth. They overstep her modesty some- 
how or other, and confer no favor. " The richest 
flavor in the poetry of John Burroughs is the 
flavor of truth, and * beauty is truth, truth beauty.' 
Unlike Thoreau, he never forgets his fellowmen, 
nor has he ever failed to find beauty in man as 
well as in Nature. 

"He sees the mower where he rides 
Above the level grassy tides 
That flood the meadow plain," 



JOHN BURROUGHS AS POET 10S 

and writes a poem. He dislikes the conventional 
in man no less than he dislikes the conventional 
in poetry, but man unaffected is as beautiful as 
the Nature that surrounds him. 

A few years ago when Mr. E. H. Harriman 
took a number of friends to Alaska on what was 
known as The Harriman Alaska Expedition, 
John Burroughs was selected as a purely literary 
man to write a narrative of the Expedition. In 
addition to the story of the trip, Mr. Burroughs 
was so inspired with the new scenery of those 
Borean Hills that the muse seized him and the 
result was three of his best poems: To the Oregon 
Robin, To the Golden Crown Sparrow of Alaska, 
and To the Lapland Longspur. Since that trip in 
1899, he has written no verse, I believe, except 
The Return. Before then he was an irregular 
contributor of poetry to the current magazines 
since the appearance of Waiting, in 1862. He 
says now that he does not seem to be in a mood 
for poetry, but that he may find his muse again 
some day. The total number of his poems in 
print amounts to only thirty-five and none of 
them are lengthy. The longest of all is his very 
life which is to me one continuous poem. His 
verses are only sparks from the life in which they 
grew, and never rise to the height of the fountain 
head. 

Perhaps one way to test a poet is to measure 
him by the number of single line poems that can 



104 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

be found in his poetry; lines that make the real 
poem of a number of verses. Pope thought that 
a long poem was a contradiction of terms, and we 
certainly know many references in the poets to 
suggestive lines that are almost poems in them- 
selves. Wordworth's Solitary Reaper contains 
one or two passages of this kind. 

"Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
For old, unhappy, far-off things, 
And battles long ago." 

or the following from the Ode: 

"Our noisy years seem moments in the 

being 
Of the eternal Silence. " 

Another of his most exquisite lines is, 

"And the stars move along the edges of the 
hills." 

Walter Pater finds in Wordsworth's poetry an 
extraordinary number of these short passage 
poems, which he called 'delicious morsels.' Cole- 
ridge says of Wordsworth : " Since Milton, I know 
of no poet with so many felicitous and unforget- 
able lines." Many critics have found these 
suggestive lines in the poets, and I find Words- 




LOOKING ACROSS THE PASTURE WALL IN THE DIRECTION 
OF THE NATHAN CHASE FARM 



JOHN BURROUGHS AS POET 105 

worth full of them. The lines of this kind that I 
find in the poetry of John Burroughs are rather 
numerous for the amount of poetry he gave to 
the world, and some of them are as fine as the 
language has. 

"Like mellow thunder leagues away," 

" I hear the wild bee's mellow chord, 
In airs that swim above, " 

"Once more the tranquil days brood o'er 
the hills, 
And sooth earth's toiling breast," 

"The dome of day o'erbrims with sound 
From humming wings on errands bound, " 

" Pausing in the twilight dim, 
Hear him lift his evening hymn, " 

"Again from out the garden hives 

The exodus of frenzied bees; 
The humming cyclone onward drives, 

Or finds repose amid the trees. " 

"Then waiting long hath recompense, 
And all the world is glad with May. " 

"Oh, skater in the fields of air," he says of the 



106 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

swallow. How well this expresses the flight of 
the swallow! 

"The robin perched on treetop tall 
Heavenward lifts his evening call. " 

" Forth from the hive go voyaging bees, 
Cruising far each sunny hour. " 

There are many passages of this kind in his 
poems and they express the moods of Nature, 
perhaps as well as it is possible for them to be put 
in words. In Arbutus Days, he uses the following 
figure to paint a spring day : 

"Like mother bird upon her nest 
The day broods o'er the earth. " 

To him the common things are all beautiful 
and if we only have the eyes to see with, they are 
made beautiful for us by him. Recognizing the 
fate of every insincere book, he declares: "Only 
an honest book can live; only absolute sincerity 
can stand the test of time. Any selfish or second- 
ary motive vitiates a work of art, as it vitiates a 
religious life. Indeed, I doubt if we fully appre- 
ciate the literary value of staple, fundamental 
human virtues and qualities — probity, directness, 
simplicity, sincerity, love." He is probably not 
an inspired poet, but I shall claim for him that he 



JOHN BURROUGHS AS POET 107 

is an honest singer, a sincere interpreter of Nature, 
and every virtue referred to in the above quota- 
tion he has woven into Bird and Bough. What 
he says of another we can appropriately say of 
him : " This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs, 
and has sought to adjust his imagination to the 
modern problems and conditions, always taking 
care, however, to preserve an outlook into the 
highest regions. " 






JOHN BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN 

A certain publisher, who honored very 
much Walt Whitman, could have 
paid him no higher tribute than to 
have closed the preface to Whitman's 
Poems as follows: "To have met Whitman was a 
privilege, to have been his friend was an honor. 
The latter was mine; and among the many remin- 
iscences of my life, none are to me more pleasing 
than those which gather about the name of 'The 
Good Grey Poet'. " 

John Burroughs was for thirty years the inti- 
mate friend and constant associate of Walt Whit- 
man, and I have heard him say that those were 
among the most pleasant years of his life. All 
who ever knew Whitman, and became in any way 
intimate with him, have practically the same to 
say of him. No writer ever unfolded himself 
and his greatness more completely than Whitman, 
and yet we have a great many excellent critics 
who are pretty harsh on him. This we believe is 
so, because the critics have not read the poet 
aright. They have failed to get out of the poems 
what was put in them. Whitman is not a poet 
according to classical standards, but as a "Crea- 
tor" he is. 

108 






BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN 109 

Emerson says of his poetry: "I find it the 
most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that 
America has yet contributed." Julian Haw- 
thorne says of it: "Original and forceful, Whitman 
cannot be judged by ordinary literary standards. 
His scornful trampling upon all metrical rules, 
and his freedom in treating of matters, usually 
passed in silence, have so far been a decided 
barrier to the approval of his work." 

Professor Underwood of the California Uni- 
versity has the following good word for the poet: 
"Pupils who are accustomed to associate the 
idea of poetry with regular classic measure in 
rhyme, or in ten-syllabled blank verse or elastic 
hexameter, will commence these short and simple 
prose sentences with surprise, and will wonder 
how any number of them can form a poem. But 
let them read aloud with a mind in sympathy 
with the picture as it is displayed, and they will 
find by Nature's unmistakable response, that the 
author is a poet, and possesses the poets' incom- 
municable power to touch the heart. " 

Professor Pattee of the Pennsylvania State 
College, on the other hand says : " It is certainly 
true that to the majority of readers, * Leaves of 
Grass', contains a few good things amid a disgust- 
ing mass of rubbish. 

"Whitman is confessedly the poet of the body. 
His book is not upward. He grovels in the earth- 
ly and disgusting parts of human life and experi- 
ence. His egotism is remarkable. 



110 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

"All the great poets have looked away from 
their disgusting surroundings and fleshly fetters, 
into a world of their creation that was bright and 
ethereal, but Whitman cries: T am satisfied with 
the perishable and the casual.' This alone would 
debar him from the company of the great masters 
of song." 

Professor Newcomer of Stanford University, 
divides honors by offending and defending : 

First: "It deliberately violates the rules of art, 
and unless we admit that our rules are idle, we 
must admit Whitman's defects." 

Second: "It is diffuse, prolix." 

Third: "This is perhaps the most that can be 
charged — he was needlessly gross." 

Fourth: "The innovations in his vocabulary 
are inexcusable. " 

In the following, he as faithfully defends the 
poet. 

First: Of the charged egotism: "It was not to 
parade himself as an exceptional being, but rather 
as an average man to hold the mirror up to other 
men and declare his kinship with them." 

Second: "Taking Whitman simply at his own 
valuation we get much. The joys of free fellow- 
ship, the love of comrades, none has sung more 
heartily or worthily. And his courage and op- 
timism are as deep as Emerson's." 

Third: "He became the truest laureate of the 
war, and of Lincoln the idol of the people. " 



BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN 111 

Fourth: "Comerado this is no book. Who 
touches this touches a man! As such, therefore, 
the book must go down to posterity, not a perfect 
song, but a cry vibrant still with the feeling of 
the man who uttered it." 

Professor Newcomer closes his estimate by the 
declaration that Whitman stands for the American 
people, but not in the sense that Washington or 
Lincoln or Lowell does, and that his office was 
somewhat like one who stands by and cheers 
while the procession goes by. He thinks that 
Whitman did not sit in the seats of the mighty. 

Charles W. Hubner is much more charitable 
and in fact just, with our poet of the body. He 
says: "Proclaiming the sanctity of manhood and 
womanhood, the power and eminence of God 
within us and without us; the divine relationship 
of body and soul; the eternalness of spirit and 
matter, he aims to teach us that all of these are 
manifestations of the Almighty spirit, present 
within and without all things, and out of whom 
all created things have come." How far this 
critic removes Whitman from the class of those 
who stood by and cheered while the procession 
moved on! Hubner makes him a real teacher 
and revealer of divine laws and eternal truth. 

Joel Chandler Harris has also given a vivid 
picture and a most wholesome interpretation of 
Whitman: "In order to appreciate Whitman's 
poetry and his purpose, it is necessary to possess 



112 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

the intuition that enables the mind to grasp in 
instant and express admiration, the vast group of 
facts that make man — that make liberty — that 
make America. There is no poetry in the details; 
it is all in the broad, sweeping, comprehensive 
assimilation of the mighty forces behind them — 
the inevitable, unaccountable, irresistible forward 
movement of man in the making of the republic. " 
These estimates pro and con could be multiplied 
indefinitely. 

How much more beautiful it is to face this new 
force in American poetry and deal with it justly, 
than to stand off and bark like some of our lesser 
critics have done and are doing! A recent com- 
ment upon Whitman says he has come to stay, 
and we must make up our minds to study him 
and to dispose of him by getting in sympathy 
with him, rather than by decrying him. This 
seems the just way, and the only safe way to deal 
with any great original force in literature. 

John Burroughs has undoubtedly interpreted 
Whitman better than any other critic, and un- 
questionably owes Whitman more than any one 
else. He has found in the poet what so many 
others have found in Burroughs. "Whitman 
does not to me suggest the wild and unkempt, as 
he seems to do to many; he suggests the cosmic 

and the elemental He cherished 

the hope that he had put into his 'Leaves', some 
of the tonic and fortifying quality of Nature in 






THE PILE OF STONES MARKING THE SITE OF THOREAU S 
CABIN, BY WALDEX POND 



BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN 113 

her more grand and primitive aspects." From 
Whitman, I am constrained to believe, Burroughs 
has drawn much of his primitive strength as a 
writer. Whitman opened the book of Nature 
to him, and led him into a certain wilderness of 
beauty. At twenty, Burroughs began to read 
Whitman's poems, and says of them: "I was 
attracted by the new poet's work from the first. 
It seemed to let me into a larger, freer air than I 
found in the current poetry .... Not a poet 
of dells and fells, but of the earth and the orbs. " 
He knew that he had found in Whitman a very 
strong and imposing figure, but he was doubly 
reassured when he came upon the statement 
from the English critic, John Addington Symonds, 
that Whitman had influenced him more than any 
other book except the Bible, — more than Plato, 
more than Goethe. 

It was about the year 1858, when Burroughs 
first began reading Whitman and five years after 
that, in 1863, when Burroughs moved to Washing- 
ton, the two men began to cultivate each other 
and were frequent companions till Whitman 
moved to Camden in 1873. 

The friendship of the two men became so 
beautiful and grew so sacred, till Mr. Burroughs 
visited him every year in Camden, from 1873 till 
1891, when he saw the poet for the last time. 
Whitman also visited Mr. Burroughs, who had 
gone back up the Hudson in 1873, and built his 
home at West Park, New York. 



114 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

The peculiar mountain wilderness around Slab- 
sides induced the Naturalist to name the woods 
about his home, Whitman Land, and now you 
will hear him speak of the border of "Whitman 
Land," when he approaches Slabsides. I have 
sometimes thought that Whitman's influence on 
him, more than Thoreau's, induced him to retreat 
to the woods and build Slabsides, where he could 
"follow out these lessons of the earth and air." 
So much of this elemental power or force has he 
seen in Whitman, that he honestly, and probably 
justly, thinks him "the strongest poetic pulse 
that has yet beat in America, or perhaps in 
Modern times." A study of the poet is to him 
an application of the laws of Nature to higher 
matters, and he pleads guilty to a "loving interest 
in Whitman and his work, which may indeed 
amount to one-sided enthusiasm." But this is 
honest, real, and not affected. 

After a long study of the art of poetry and the 
artists, together with a thorough appreciation of 
form and beauty in all art, Burroughs declares 
there is once in a great while "born to a race or 
people, men who are like an eruption of life from 
another world, who belong to another order, who 
bring other standards, and sow the seeds of new 
and larger types; who are not the organs of the 
culture or modes of their time and whom their 
times for the most part decry and disown — the 
primal, original, elemental men. It is here in my 



BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN 115 

opinion that we must place Whitman; not among 
the minstrels and edifiers of his age, but among 
its prophets and saviors. He is nearer the sources 
of things than the popular poets — nearer the 
founder and discoverer, closer akin to the large, 
fervent, prophetic, patriarchal men, who figure 
in the early heroic ages. His work ranks with 
the great primitive books. He is of the type of 
the skald, the bard, the seer, the prophet/' In 
another place, Burroughs thinks that one can 
better read Whitman after reading the Greeks, 
than after reading our finer artists, and I have 
found this true. 

We cannot wonder that he finds Whitman 
"the one mountain in our literary landscape," 
though, as he appropriately says there are many 
beautiful hills. Tall and large, he grew more 
beautiful in his declining years, and "the full 
beauty of his face and head did not appear till he 
was past sixty." However he was dressed, and 
wherever he was, one could not fail to be im- 
pressed "with the clean, fresh quality of the man. " 
To me, his poems have this same clean, fresh 
quality, and I never read one of them that I don't 
feel far more satisfied with my lot. 

Whitman says: "I do not call one greater and 
one smaller. That which fills its place is equal 
to any. " To him, as to any prophet of the soul, 
greatness is filling one's place, and the poor get 
as much consolation out of this almost, as they do 



116 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

from Christ's beatitude: "Blessed are the poor 
for they shall inherit the earth." To make a 
world, it takes many kinds of individuals, and 
Whitman did not rank them severally according 
to money, culture and social position. If a man 
filled his place, he was equal to any one else, for 
that is the whole duty of man. 

He did not grovel in the earthly and disgusting, 
as one of our " artistic" critics has said above. He 
alluded to many things that the over-nice could 
call disgusting, but he saw and painted only the 
beautiful in it all. For an instance that happens 
to come to my mind, he alludes to the battle of 
Alamo, but overlooks the military display, the 
common part of the slaughter. This may be 
found in any battle, and why Alamo and Goliad, 
if only to picture an army ! Certainly there were 
more imposing dress parades than that. But 
after Fannin had surrendered and had accepted 
honorable terms that were offered by the Mexican 
General Urrea, Santa Anna orders the entire 
body of United States Soldiers executed, and on 
that bright and beautiful sunshiny Palm Sunday, 
they were marched out upon the neighboring 
prairie and shot down in cold blood, and their 
bodies committed to the flames ! Such a horrible 
picture has not been recorded elsewhere in the 
history of this republic. What then does Whit- 
man say? 






BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN 117 

"Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of 

four hundred and twelve young men. 
Retreating, they formed in a hollow square, 

with their baggage for breastworks; 
Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding 

enemy's, nine times their number was the 

price they took in advance; 
Their colonel was wounded and their ammuni- 
tion gone; 
They treated for an honorable capitulation, 

received writing and seal, gave up their arms, 

and marched back prisoners of war. 
They were the glory of the race of rangers; 
Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, 

courtship, 
Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, 

and affectionate, 
Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of 

hunters, 
Not a single one over thirty years of age. 
The second First-day morning they were 

brought out in squads and massacred — it 

was beautiful early summer; 
The work commenced about five o'clock, and 

was over by eight. 

None obeyed the command to kneel; 

Some made a mad and helpless rush — some 

stood stark and straight; 
A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart — 

the living and dead lay together; 



118 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

The maimed and mangled dug in the dirt — the 

newcomers saw them there; 
Some, half -killed, attempted to crawl away; 
These were despatched with bayonets, or 

battered with the blunts of muskets; 
A youth not seventeen years old seiz'd his 

assassin till two more came to release him ; 
The three were all torn, and covered with the 

boy's blood. 

At eleven o'clock began the burning of the 
bodies : 

That is the tale of the murder of the four hund- 
red and twelve young men. " 

After reading this picture of the horrible battle 
or slaughter at Goliad, who wonders that the 
battle cry at San Jacinto was, "Remember the 
Alamo!" or "Remember Goliad!" And still less 
do we wonder that the Mexicans, while scattered 
after the battle could be heard on all sides, "Me 
no Alamo!" "Me no Goliad!" Our poet has 
given the best picture we shall ever get of the 
Alamo and Goliad. The burden of his big, warm 
heart was to portray in vivid colors, the tragedy 
of the four hundred and twelve young men, and 
how manly they suffered. 

John Burroughs has observed from the notes of 
Mr. Charles W. Eldridge, that Emerson was not 
only an admirer of Whitman, but that every year 



BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN 119 

from 1855 to 1860, he sought Whitman in his 
Brooklyn home. The two men were together 
much, but Walt never sought Emerson. When 
he was invited by Emerson to Concord, he refused 
to go, perhaps because he feared that he would 
see too much of that "literary coterie that then 
clustered there, chiefly around Emerson. " 

Burroughs is also responsible for the suggestion 
that Whitman burst into full glory at one bound, 
and his work from the first line is Mature. At 
the age of thirty-five, a great change came over 
the man and his habits were different thereafter. 
His first poem, " Starting from Paumanook, " out- 
lines his work, observes Burroughs, and he fulfills 
every promise made. 

"I conned old times; 

I sat studying at the feet of the great Masters, 
Now, if eligible, O that the great Masters might 
return and study me ! 

The Soul: 

Forever and forever — longer than soil is brown 

and solid — longer than water ebbs and flows. 
I will mate the poems of materials, for I think 

they are to be the most spiritual poems — 
Apd I will mate the poems of my body and 

mortality, 
For I think I shall then supply myself with the 

poems of my Soul, and of immortality. " 



120 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

And so he did. As perfect as the last or any 
part of his work is the first. But the poet is true 
to himself and to the great undertaking. 

In what particular qualities does Whitman 
differ from the other poets? Especially the poets 
who conform to the traditions of the past. 

"When Tennyson sends out a poem," ob- 
serves Burroughs, "it is perfect, like an apple or 
a peach; slowly wrought out and dismissed, it 
drops from his boughs, holding a conception or 
an idea that spheres it and makes it whole. It 
is completed, distinct and separate — might be 
his, or might be any man's. It carries his quality, 
but it is a thing of itself, and centers and depends 
upon itself. Whether or not the world will here- 
after consent, as in the past, to call only beautiful 
creations of this sort, poems, remains to be seen. 
But this is certainly not what Walt Whitman 
does, or aims to do, except in a few cases. He 
completes no poems apart from himself. His 
lines or pulsations, thrills, waves of force, inde- 
finite dynamic, formless, constantly emanating 
from the living centre, and they carry the quality 
of the Author's personal presence with them in a 
way that is unprecedented in literature. " 

The more I read Whitman the more I am 
drawn to him, and feel the greatness of the man. 
His poems have meant to me recently, what 
Emerson's Essays meant to me as a younger man. 
In about the same way they affect me now, only 
my love for the poems grows with each reading. 



BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN 121 

It is well to recall that so much was John 
Burroughs inspired by his early contact with 
Whitman that his first book was, Notes on Walt 
Whitman, as Poet and Person, which was printed 
in 1867. A little later, in 187 r , he renewed his 
study of the poet, in his last essay in Birds and 
Poets. The title of the essay is "The Flight of 
the Eagle, " and is one of Burrough's best papers. 
Still later, in about 1895, he wrote his final word 
on Whitman, in his volume, Whitman: A Study. 
This last volume is a complete interpretation of 
the poet. The poems of the man are given full 
treatment, and it is perhaps the best defense of 
Whitman in print. 

The publishers of these books have long ex- 
pected to get John Burroughs to write a biography 
of Whitman, but his many other literary activi- 
ties, have combined to banish their hopes, and 
in his stead, Mr. Bliss Perry, in 1905, was asked to 
write the biography, which was published in 1906. 

In recent years, Whitman has been gaining 
pretty general acceptance, and most of the papers 
in current literature expose his merits. His 
enemies are growing fewer and fewer, and those 
who still survive are not so bold. They are on 
the defensive instead of the offensive. He is such 
a potent factor in the present day literature of 
America, that our only conclusion is that he is 
with us to stay, and the sooner we learn to 'Walk 
the open road' with him, the better will we be 



122 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

prepared for the future critic of American litera- 
ture. 

Bliss Perry thinks that on account "of the 
amplitude of his imagination," and "the majesty 
with which he confronts the eternal realities," 
instead of the absolute perfection of his poems, 
he is bound to a place somewhere among the 
immortals. 

Mr. Perry has made a critical study of Whitman, 
and his judgment and conclusions are charitable 
and will stand. No critic can ever give an ade- 
quate conception of Whitman's poems. As he, 
himself said, "They will elude you." In order 
to understand in any degree his eccentricities and 
his poetic freedom, one must go to the poems and 
read them as a whole. One will either turn away 
from them for a breath of air, or he will be forever 
won by them. 

I happened to be among the latter class, and I 
must agree with his most enthusiastic critics, that 
he is a real poet, and one of the few that make 
you think and feel. Most of our other American 
poets have said some pretty things in verse but 
are not elemental. They lack the "high serious- 
ness," the all-essential quality of a real poet. 
This quality we cannot fail to recognize in Whit- 
man, from the beginning to the end, if we tolerate 
him. 

Mr. Stedman's paper on Whitman, though less 
readable than Burroughs', and far more labored 



BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN 123 

than Mr. Perry's, contains many excellent 
estimates of Whitman's democracy, and a lover 
of Whitman cannot afford to be ignorant of his 
fine judgments. He thinks that Whitman is well 
equipped as a poet — having had such genuine 
intercourse "With Nature in her broadest and 
minutest forms. " 



JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS 

ONE day while I was at West Park, 
John Burroughs and I had started 
over the mountains to Slabsides, and 
just as we had crossed the railroad we 
noticed a small flock of English sparrows in some 
nearby trees. We both halted suddenly and 
after a moment's silence he said: "I think the 
English sparrow will eventually develop some 
form of song. Listen to that suppressed sound 
so near to song! I have often wondered if all 
birds do not develop song by degrees, and if so, 
how long it takes or has taken such birds as the 
thrushes, the song sparrows and the wrens to 
develop their songs. Bird songs have always 
been an interesting study to me." It would be 
hard for me to conceive of one of his books being 
complete without some mention of bird life in it. 
I am sure he would not attempt to complete a 
Nature book and leave birds out of it. 

One of our first American Bird Societies, which 
was organized in 1900, was named after him, but 
I am not sure that this ever pleased him, as he 
was not an ornithologist in any restricted sense, 
and he certainly sees how much better it is for 
the organization to have been renamed and after 

124 



JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS 125 

Audubon, our greatest Ornithologist. Whenever 
I have been with him, and a bird of any kind 
appeared in sight or in hearing, he was sure to 
observe it first, and has been the means of sharpen- 
ing my eyes and ears. Each of the little stories 
that follow, has been the result directly, or in- 
directly, of my walks in the woods with him. 
No school library is quite complete without a 
copy of his Wake Robin as it savors of that 
peculiar delight with which out-door life imbues 
him, as no other book he ever wrote, and I must 
say, puts one in tune with Nature as no book 
with which I am acquainted. The two essays 
Spring at the Capitol and The Return of the Birds, 
give one the true spirit of the Naturalist, and have 
the best spirit of the out-door world in every 
paragraph and sentence. 

Mr. Sharpe rightly thinks that Burroughs is 
more than a scientist, for he is always hiding his 
science in love and genuine interest, though he 
is generally true to the facts. As an evidence of 
his genuineness he refuses to go to Nature in 
'the reporter fashion, but must camp and tramp 
with her' in order for the truth to sink in and 
become part of him. Then he gives up only that 
which has clung to him, and certainly we do not 
find in his writings anything but the reflection 
of some phase of Nature. Go to the fields and 
the mountains with him, and you will soon be 
impressed that he is on speaking terms with bird 



126 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

life in almost every detail. This sincerity has 
impressed me as much as his ability to see and 
read Nature. 

The Tragedy of the Chickadee's Nest 

Usually when I find a bird's nest in a con- 
spicuous place, I have a peculiar feeling that the 
bird has not chosen wisely, but I suspect that 
most birds that are on good terms with man, 
choose to brave his presence rather than risk 
themselves further away from man, and out 
where birds of prey and animals dangerous to 
them, are accustomed to go. They seem to think 
that man will do to trust, while they know that 
Nature knows no other law but struggle and 
destruction. 

The little nest about which I am now to tell 
was in an old decayed fencepost about three 
feet from the ground on the south side of the 
lane that leads down through the pasture and 
to the lake beyond. It was easily accessible to 
all that passed along the lane, and besides, the 
chickadee is so motherly in her habits and so 
innocent of all that is going on about her, that one 
can see her on the post or even in the door of the 
little house almost any time. The interest I 
had taken in the nest, caused me to frighten her 
away many times as I passed down the lane on 
my morning and afternoon walks. I thought 



JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS 127 

that I would by this means train her to be a little 
more cautious, but she seemed to take my warn- 
ing as a joke and finally became so gentle that I 
could almost put my hand on her. 

When I knew that many of the day laborers 
had discovered my nest and had become some- 
what curious about it, I began to entertain grave 
doubts as to whether the brood would ever come 
off. For very few people have a real love for 
birds and bird-life, and most people rather delight 
to tell of their brutality to the bird kingdom, when 
they were smaller. Many times have I sat and 
listened to men tell of how many bird nests they 
broke up when they were boys, and they seemed 
to think that a boy could spend his time no 
better. Some of my neighbors have large collec- 
tions of birds' eggs that were taken in this spirit, 
and I think they belong to that class of 'Oologists,' 
spoken of by Burroughs as the worst enemies of 
our birds, Vho plunder nests and murder their 
owners in the name of science.' 

While I was out one morning for my usual 
walk, my attention was attracted by an unusually 
joyful song, "Chickadee-Dee, Chickadee-Dee," in 
rapid succession, a little softer and sweeter than 
I had heard from my black cap this season, and 
I decided to see if there was not some love-mak- 
ing going on. As Seton-Thompson says, I 'froze' 
for a few moments and saw what it all meant. 
The mother bird was building her nest in the 



128 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

post to which I have already referred. The male 
bird did not appear till three days after, but how 
interested he was when he did come upon the 
scene. When these little birds decided to neigh- 
bor with me my heart rejoiced, for I had often 
during the winter seen the vacant home and 
wondered if it would be occupied in the summer, 
and if so by whom. As soon as I knew that my 
chickadees were really to stay I thought to my- 
self: Well I shall have one good neighbor at least. 
On the morning of the 26th of April, I looked into 
the nest to see what progress was being made with 
the new home, and found the female bird on, 
but she made no attempt to fly away. I went 
away whistling and at the same time thinking 
that I should soon see some fledgelings with open 
mouths for food, and that I would in all probabili- 
ty, have the pleasure of giving them a morsel 
occasionally. To aid the mother in this way 
helps to get in sympathy with bird life. For 
then we feel that we have become partly responsi- 
ble for their health and daily bread. I had often 
aided mother birds in feeding their young, though 
I do not remember to have rendered such service 
to chickadees. I have, however, known for a 
long time that chickadees are noted for their 
gentleness and fearlessness. When they meet 
honesty they are always ready to make friends 
and will cheer you with their little familiar ditty, 
but they seem to divine evil, and will get on the 




POINTING OUT THE JUNCO S NEST BY A MOUNTAIN ROADSIDE 



JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS 129 

other side of the tree from the boy that carries a 
sling-shot. Nature seems to have taught them 
what and whom to fear. 

I shall never forget how provoked I was, when 
I passed down the lane on Monday morning, May 
4th, and found that some vandal had been there 
and robbed and partially destroyed the nest on 
Sunday, the day before. I was cross all day and 
could not collect myself. Everything in my 
office went wrong and what little work I did that 
day had to be done over later. This little nest 
had meant a great deal to me, and the mosti nter- 
esting stage of its development had not yet been 
reached. If it had been any other nest probably 
it would not have affected me so seriously or 
grieved me so much, but this little family had, in 
a measure, become a part of my own family, and 
I had a most tender feeling for it. The poor 
mother bird I saw in some small oaks not far 
from the wrecked home and I watched her for a 
long time, that I might see just what emotions 
she would express to me. The sadness of her 
song chickadee-dee, chickadee-dee, was evident, 
but she uttered these words in rapid succession. 
The following seemed to be her feeling : 

Soliloquy of the Chickadee 

"Alas! How fallen is man! I never yet have 
given cause for complaint, nor cost man anything. 



130 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

My deeds have been deeds of kindness. I am 
calm and peaceful among my neighbors, and have 
ever loved man's humanity. Never did I think 
that such a fate as this awaited me at the hand of 
man whom I have cheered all seasons of the year, 
in May and December alike, as he has gone forth 
to and from his daily labor. Had this misfortune 
been brought on by some cat or mink or weasel, 
or even by some of my bird enemies, I could have 
reconciled myself to it. But I have been man's 
best friend and he knows it. My numberless 
ancestors have been among man's best support- 
ers. My dream has been, during these many 
days of toil and care, to watch my happy little 
family of birds grow up in the ways of chickadees, 
that they too could soon be able to go forth pre- 
pared for the battle of life and partake of the 
great feast of insects and worms and insect eggs, 
so abundant over there in the orchards and lawns 
and to which all farm crops would become a prey 
without us. 

"But alas! My hopes are blighted and my 
dream turned into a nightmare. Only one egg 
pipped, so I could glimpse the little mouth be- 
neath! A ray of sunshine! A consummation 
devoutly to be wished for! My little ones break- 
ing through those prison walls, soon to become 
my companions ! 

"Today it is all over. A funeral dirge instead 
of songs of joy and gladness ! Some vandals have 



JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS 131 

wrecked my home and destroyed my prospective 
little ones ! I almost wish they had taken me too. 
What have I done to cost me this? You said 
you would protect me, man! Are you doing 
it? Have I proved unworthy of your good will 
and friendship? My record will bear me witness 
before any court in the land. " 

Presently the male bird came upon the spot, 
but had very little to say. What little he did 
say seemed to be very consoling to the mother 
bird. As he receded to the thick of the pasture 
again, the mother bird began anew her low mel- 
ancholy song. How can we ever reconcile such 
thoughtless deeds with the higher forms of civiliza- 
tion! But we must return to the nest. It was 
not entirely destroyed, and I gathered the re- 
mains, which contained two eggs covered in the 
litter torn from the walls of the nest. I sawed 
off the post just below the nest cavity and put it in 
my office. The eggs were white with brownish 
red spots. The nest was made of fibrous roots, 
jute fiber lined with hair. Dr. Bachman found 
one made of fine wool, cotton and some fibres of 
plants, containing pure white eggs, the nest being 
in a hollow stump about four feet from the 
ground. It is safe to say that the chickadee is a 
resident bird throughout the United States and 
is rather abundant in the Southern states. 

I have often thought that we could make our- 



132 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

selves far happier if we studied birds aesthetically, 
rather than economically, but it seems that we 
shall for a long time to come, count the worth of 
any factor in Nature by utilitarian methods. If 
we must do so, let us see what kind of showing 
our chickadee makes for herself. Let us see just 
what relation she bears to plant life. Edward H. 
Furbush finds that the chickadee feeds upon tent 
caterpillars and their eggs; both species of the 
cankerworm moth and their larvae; codling 
moths with their larvae; the forest tent cater- 
pillar, and the larva chrysalis and imago of the 
gypsy and brown tail moths. They also eat the 
lice and their eggs of the apple and willow. We 
see then that a great deal can be said in their 
favor. Another thing so favorable to our little 
friend is that of all his or her habits of life, we 
know of nothing bad. All that can be said is in 
her favor, more than can be said of many of us. 
The sad story of my chickadee's nest will sug- 
gest to all thinking people the reason why so 
many of our valuable birds are so rapidly vanish- 
ing or diminishing in numbers, and the urgent 
need for an immediate check upon our wreckless 
slaughter. Upon a careful count in several parts 
of the country it has been found that birds are a 
natural check upon insect pests, and not to protect 
and welcome them is to foster the growth of these 
pests. The fate of this little nest is likewise the 
fate of many thousand nests annually, of useful 



JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS 133 

birds. Who could ever estimate the gallons of 
innocent blood shed at the hands of the untrained 
and wilfully evil bands of boys roving the woods 
on the Sabbath ! 

Robins 

Recently in a letter to the Burroughs' Nature 
Study Clubs of a Southern state John Burroughs 
wrote : 

"If your club can help to send back the 
robin to us in the spring with his breast un- 
stained with his own blood, but glowing with 
the warmth of your shining and hospitable land, 
I shall rejoice that it bears my name." 

The people in the Northern United States have 
courted favor with the robin and in every way 
possible protect him, and are always ready to 
welcome him back after the winter is over, and in 
fact, the robin is to be praised for his summer 
popularity as much as he is to be pitied for his 
winter treatment in the south. One writer says 
his return to the north 'is announced by the news- 
papers like that of eminent or notorious people 
to a watering place, as the first authentic notifica- 
tion of spring.' There, where robins are appreci- 
ated, they become quite tame and build and raise 
their young in the orchards and about the houses. 



134 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

Birds are not altogether unlike people in that 
they never forget favors. They always know in 
what sections of country they are welcomed. 

When robin redbreast returns south, he comes 
driven by the chilly blasts of the Ice King of the 
north, and I regret to say has to face the Southern 
people with fear and trembling. Parents allow 
boys to take guns and go out and kill anything 
legally or illegally, and such boys always develop 
the brutal and barbarous instinct of murder — 
taking innocent blood. The following I clipped 
from the locals of a weekly newspaper in the 
Southern part of Georgia: 

"They have about succeeded in killing all the 
robins out at 'Robin's Roost,' near Robert's Mill. 
Thousands of these birds had been flying to a ford 
near there to roost, and they offered fine sport for 
those who like shooting. " 

The reporter of the above seemed to count it a 
success to kill all the robins. Moreover he 
affirms that killing them is fine sport. This spirit 
of slaughter is no doubt born in us, but it does 
seem that we could teach the young how to love, 
to protect, and to enjoy rather than to kill! kill! 
kill! Some boys I know can hardly bear to see a 
live bird of any kind, but are perfectly at ease if 
they can kill something. They take some weapon 
with them as religiously as they take their books 
to school, in order that nothing escape them. 
They are always hoping to see some form of bird 



JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS 135 

life to persecute or slaughter. Our public schools 
are beginning to interest themselves in bird pro- 
tection, and I am glad to say, have accomplished 
great good wherever they have tried to teach 
simple lessons of bird life to school children. 

The robin is too valuable to exterminate as he 
feeds upon noxious weed seeds and injurious 
insects, and usually has a good appetite and 
certainly never eats useful plants in the south. 
His practical value to Orchards and Agriculture 
generally, should be impressed upon parents and 
a love for him impressed upon the younger minds. 
When we cannot appeal through either of these 
channels, we should arouse the sympathy of the 
public. Robins ordinarily come south to spend 
the winter, as the weather is much warmer and 
they get a greater food supply. But in 1905, a 
small flock of them wintered near Lake Forest, 
Elinois. This I think was due to the fact that 
the birds did not care to face their enemies of the 
South. In that section of country from Lake 
Forest to Naukegan, Illinois, not a robin had 
been shot for several years past. The birds 
knew their friends and preferred to brave the 
Northern winter with them, rather than come 
down south where our youths are forever running 
through the woods with gun on shoulder ready 
to take life. 

Burroughs says: "Robin is one of our most 
native and democratic birds; he is one of the 



136 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

family (in the north) and seems much more to 
us than those rare exotic visitors with their dis- 
tant and high-bred ways." The carol of the 
robin is very inspiring as you hear him: 

"Heavenward lift his evening hymn," 
or perhaps when you first wake in the morning 
at early dawn, and listen to his love song, as he 
perches on some tree-top in the edge of a near-by 
woods. How rich his red breast looks from such 
a perch just as the sun comes above the horizon 
and reflects its first rays against him! Just one 
experience like this in the whole year, how much 
it would add to life's pleasures! "With this 
pleasing association with the opening season, 
amidst the fragrance of flowers and the improving 
verdure of the fields, we listen with peculiar 
pleasure to the simple song of the robin. The 
confidence he reposes in us by making his abode 
in our gardens and orchards, the frankness and 
innocence of his manners, besides his vocal 
powers to please, inspire respect and attachment, 
even in the truant school-boy, and his exposed 
nest is but rarely molested," says Nuttall, who 
writes eloquently of the robin. 

The robin sings in autumn as well as in spring, 
and his autumn song is by no means inferior to 
his spring song, and I have always loved the old 
song, Good-bye to Summer, because of the special 
tribute to the robin's song, the chorus of which 
goes, 



JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS 137 

"O, Robin, Robin, redbreast! 
O, Robin, Robin, dear! 
O, Robin, sing so sweetly, 
In the falling of the year!" 

It is rather interesting to note, however, that 
they usually sing in concert when they return 
south in the autumn. You can hear them in 
great numbers singing while feeding around a 
patch of Ilex glabra, the berries of which afford 
them considerable food in mid-winter. I love 
to welcome them back to the south in the autumn, 
and to hear their beautiful concert song. 

Blackbirds 

It is rather remarkable to note how easy it is 
to cultivate the friendship of birds, even birds 
that are ordinarily quite wild. When I used to 
go to my office in the early morning, I always 
scattered a few handfuls of grits around the back 
window that I might accommodate some of my 
special friends to a breakfast, and it required only 
a short time for me to win the confidence of so 
many birds that I had to limit them to quite a 
short breakfast. At first no blackbirds came 
near me or my place of business. Soon they 
would sit on near-by trees and return to the 
grounds immediately after I returned from the yard 
back into the house. I had among my daily 



138 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

visitors not less than three or four hundred of 
these welcome friends. They would play around 
in the yard very amusingly and pick at each 
other much like children and afforded me much 
amusement and many pleasant moments in the 
course of a week. 

Blackbirds have very little music in them or 
rather get very little out of themselves. John 
Burroughs has this to say of their music: "Their 
voices always sound as if they were laboring under 
a severe attack of influenza, though a large flock 
of them heard at a distance on a bright afternoon 
of early spring produce an effect not unpleasing. 
The air is filled with crackling, splintering, spurt- 
ing semi-musical sounds, which are like pepper 
and salt to the ear. " I really enjoy the mingled 
sounds produced by a great congregation of them, 
and often follow a flock of them down the creek 
side to their favorite resting place, just to hear 
them. They are always in great flocks here 
during the winter, and sometimes when feeding 
along on a hillside, the rear ranks marching over 
the bulk to the front in rapid succession, present 
an appearance somewhat like heavy waves of the 
sea, and one a short distance looks on with admira- 
tion and even surprise, to see such symmetry and 
uniformity in their movement. 

One cannot fail to appreciate how much good 
a great flock of them do in a day as they move 
across a field covered with noxious grass and 



JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS 139 

weed seeds. They seem to form an army in order 
to co-operate with man in every possible way to 
balance up the powers of nature. Weeds prevent 
crops from growing. Every seed that germinates 
in the soil and is allowed to grow, if only for a 
short while, tends to exhaust the soil. If the 
birds get these seeds in winter before germination 
begins, the useful plants will have a much larger 
fund of food from which to draw. Once in a 
while our blackbirds get a little grain and the 
farmer condemns them and looks upon them 
only with a murderer's eye. The birds do a 
hundred times more good than evil, and should 
not be condemned on such slight provocation. 
Their hard fare during the winter makes them 
rush into the fields sometimes in spring and get a 
taste of grains useful to man, but surely they 
should be pitied rather than censured, and so 
long as I can get them to depend on me for help, 
I am going to put out a mite for their breakfast. 
With sorrow I bid them goodbye each spring, 
but with renewed delight I hail with joy their 
return in autumn with their young. 

The Nuthatch 

Could I ever be satisfied were I located in some 
nook of this old earth where the voice of the 
nuthatch is not heard once in a while ! His simple 
song — I speak of the white-breasted nuthatch — 



140 RAMBLES WITH JOHN BURROUGHS 

beats time to my daily routine of laboratory and 
field work and its very simplicity adds dignity to 
my little friend's life. All will easily recognize 
this useful little neighbor. His coat is of light 
blueish gray above, with a crown, nap, and upper 
back black. His tail and wings have black 
markings, while his lower parts and sides of head 
are white in the main. It is remarkable to find 
the nuthatch so ready to make friends with us, 
when he is generally considered a forest bird in 
this part of the country. 

I see two or three of them near my office every 
day, and take much delight in my study of them 
and their habits. They have a peculiar way of 
perching, head downward, on the trunk of a tree 
and go that way most of the time. A small 
white-breasted bird on the trunk of a tree with 
head downward, is pretty good evidence that it 
is the nuthatch. This attitude is so natural 
that the older ornithologists — Audubon and Wil- 
son — claim that they sleep in that position. I 
am not prepared to affirm or deny the rumor as 
my study of this bird, and all other birds, is restrict- 
ed to their daylight comedies and tragedies, 
though I do often hear certain members of bird 
families singing at all hours of the night during 
certain seasons. 

His song is, as above stated, quite simple only 
one note repeated over and over — konk-konk, 
konk-konk, two strokes generally in rapid succes- 




MY CHICKADEE S NEST 



JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS 141 

sion — a kind of a nasal piping, or as one bird lover 
has said: "A peculiar, weird sound, somewhat like 
the quack of a duck, but higher keyed and with 
less volume, having a rather musical twang. " 

During the winter months he finds much time 
to search about on the ground for food, and con- 
sequently his crop is at such time partly filled 
with noxious weed seeds. In spring and summer, 
he searches all round the trunks and branches of 
trees for small insects and insect eggs, and as 
you approach him to study him he seems entirely 
unconscious of your presence, which I have 
thought almost approaches human affectation, 
and I wonder if this is not one of the alluring 
arts of the white-breasted nuthatch. Birds, in 
some way or other, express almost all human 
attributes, love, hate, anger, joy, sorrow, if we 
only are able to read them, and it is not unreason- 
able to assume that they are sometimes affecta- 
tious. The Southern mocking bird certainly 
seems to border vanity sometimes. 



1912 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





012 073 710 7 






